Type of site | Financial news and analysis |
---|---|
Available in | English |
Owner | Aurora Advisors Incorporated |
Created by | Yves Smith |
URL | www |
Commercial | Yes |
Registration | None |
Launched | December 2006 |
Current status | Online |
Naked Capitalism is a liberal American group blog focused on the financial sector. [1] [2] Susan Webber, the principal of Aurora Advisors Incorporated, a management-consulting firm based in New York City, launched the site in late 2006, using the pen name Yves Smith. [3] She focused on finance and economic news and analysis, with an emphasis on legal and ethical issues of the banking industry and the mortgage foreclosure process, the worldwide effects of the banking crisis of 2008, the 2007–2012 global financial crisis, and its aftermath. The site became one of the most highly frequented financial blogs on the Internet [4] and has published a number of noted exposés since.
Webber graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Business School. [5] She began her career in the financial services industry in 1981 at Goldman Sachs, later moving to McKinsey & Co. and Sumitomo Bank. [6] In 1989 she founded her own company. [6]
Webber started the Naked Capitalism blog because she saw a reporting gap in 2006, just before the financial crisis – there was a lot of anxiety among seasoned observers, yet the US press featured "all this cheerleading [of the financial industry] and there was a lack of any skepticism [...] How could anyone in the market not see what was going on? That we were going to have some sort of train wreck?" [7]
Webber has also written under her pen name – a pun on the 18th-century economist Adam Smith [8] – for other outlets including the New York Times , [9] New York magazine, [10] Bloomberg, [11] and the Roosevelt Institute. [12]
Naked Capitalism is written by a small group of contributors. [2] [13] In addition to Webber herself, current and former contributors include:
Naked Capitalism became widely read during the 2007–2008 financial crisis as people were trying to come to grips with what was happening. [3] [6] This led to TV appearances for Smith on stations such as CNBC, CNN, Fox News and PBS, and she was approached to write a book on the crisis. [6] [27]
In a 2010 piece critiquing the Wall Street Journal's coverage of the foreclosure scandal, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that the Wall Street Journal was being "outclassed" by Naked Capitalism. [28] In 2011, TIME included Naked Capitalism among "The 25 Best Financial Blogs", saying that Smith had been well ahead of the curve in understanding the financial crisis. [29] Stephen Gandel, reviewing Naked Capitalism for TIME, said that "At times, Naked Capitalism's accusations against Wall Street can be hard to prove. But the blog's sense of right and wrong rings true to me." [29]
In 2011, CNBC listed the site as one of the "20 Most Influential Finance Blogs", describing Smith as "a harsh critic of Wall Street who believes that fraud was at the center of the financial crisis." [30] In 2013, Wired included the blog among its "favorite sources of news covering the world of business and finance", saying Smith offered a "piercing look at the ethical and legal missteps of the global financial industry." [31]
Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney told The New York Times that the "blog gives you a very unvarnished look at the political economy. You find out things that don’t show up in the news until weeks later." [32] The New York Times financial reporter Gretchen Morgenson cited Naked Capitalism in 2014 as one of the "must-read financial blogs" she visited regularly. [33]
In 2014, Naked Capitalism obtained and published twelve Limited Partnership Agreements (LPA) – agreements between private equity firms and their portfolio companies that are termed trade secrets, an area the SEC's Special Inspector Andrew J. Bowden had promised to look into. [34] In 2015, Naked Capitalism drew attention to comments Bowden had recently made at a Stanford Law School conference that many observers felt were inappropriate and a sign of "regulatory capture" – a regulator becoming too friendly with an industry their profession requires them to regulate. [35] [36] [37] Bowden stepped down shortly after. [38]
In 2018, a Naked Capitalism article highlighting discrepancies in the work resumé of the Chief Financial Officer of the $410 billion [39] California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) was followed by the executive's departure. [40] [41] In 2020, a Naked Capitalism blog post pointing out disclosure discrepancies toppled the same organization's chief investment officer. [39] [42] Naked Capitalism said the officer had personally invested in some of the same private equity groups CalPERS had invested in, creating a conflict of interest. [39] [43]
Naked Capitalism was cited by Dow Jones & Company in an amicus brief for the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court case Allen v. Cooper . [44] [45] Since 2021, the site has been archived monthly in the Economics Blogs Web Archive at the Library of Congress. [46] [47]
Instapundit is a conservative blog maintained by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee.
Foreclosure is a legal process in which a lender attempts to recover the balance of a loan from a borrower who has stopped making payments to the lender by forcing the sale of the asset used as the collateral for the loan.
Market fundamentalism, also known as free-market fundamentalism, is a term applied to a strong belief in the ability of unregulated laissez-faire or free-market capitalist policies to solve most economic and social problems. It is often used as pejorative by critics of said beliefs.
Raveendra Nath "Ravi" Batra is an Indian-American economist, author, and professor at Southern Methodist University. Batra is the author of six bestselling books, two of which appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list, with one reaching No. 1 in late 1987. His books center on his idea that financial capitalism breeds excessive inequality and political corruption, which inevitably succumbs to financial crisis and economic depression. In his works, Batra proposes an equitable distribution system known as Progressive Utilization Theory (PROUT) as a means to not only ensure material welfare but also to secure the ability of all to develop a full personality.
Naked short selling, or naked shorting, is the practice of short-selling a tradable asset of any kind without first borrowing the asset from someone else or ensuring that it can be borrowed. When the seller does not obtain the asset and deliver it to the buyer within the required time frame, the result is known as a "failure to deliver" (FTD). The transaction generally remains open until the asset is acquired and delivered by the seller, or the seller's broker settles the trade on their behalf.
John Bellamy Foster is an American professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of the Monthly Review. He writes about political economy of capitalism and economic crisis, ecology and ecological crisis, and Marxist theory. He has given numerous interviews, talks, and invited lectures, as well as written invited commentary, articles, and books on the subject.
Willem Hendrik Buiter CBE is an American-British economist. He spent most of his career as an academic, teaching at various universities. More recently, he was Chief Economist at Citigroup.
Richard David Wolff is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and The Brecht Forum in New York City.
Branko Milanović is a Serbian-American economist. He is most known for his work on income distribution and inequality.
The subprime mortgage crisis impact timeline lists dates relevant to the creation of a United States housing bubble and the 2005 housing bubble burst and the subprime mortgage crisis which developed during 2007 and 2008. It includes United States enactment of government laws and regulations, as well as public and private actions which affected the housing industry and related banking and investment activity. It also notes details of important incidents in the United States, such as bankruptcies and takeovers, and information and statistics about relevant trends. For more information on reverberations of this crisis throughout the global financial system see Financial crisis of 2007–2008.
Financialization is a term sometimes used to describe the development of financial capitalism during the period from 1980 to present, in which debt-to-equity ratios increased and financial services accounted for an increasing share of national income relative to other sectors.
Raymond Thomas Dalio is an American billionaire investor and hedge fund manager, who has served as co-chief investment officer of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, since 1985. He founded Bridgewater in 1975 in New York.
Following the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, there was a worldwide resurgence of interest in Keynesian economics among prominent economists and policy makers. This included discussions and implementation of economic policies in accordance with the recommendations made by John Maynard Keynes in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, most especially fiscal stimulus and expansionary monetary policy.
In the United States, the Great Recession was a severe financial crisis combined with a deep recession. While the recession officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, it took many years for the economy to recover to pre-crisis levels of employment and output. This slow recovery was due in part to households and financial institutions paying off debts accumulated in the years preceding the crisis along with restrained government spending following initial stimulus efforts. It followed the bursting of the housing bubble, the housing market correction and subprime mortgage crisis.
Many factors directly and indirectly serve as the causes of the Great Recession that started in 2008 with the US subprime mortgage crisis. The major causes of the initial subprime mortgage crisis and the following recession include lax lending standards contributing to the real-estate bubbles that have since burst; U.S. government housing policies; and limited regulation of non-depository financial institutions. Once the recession began, various responses were attempted with different degrees of success. These included fiscal policies of governments; monetary policies of central banks; measures designed to help indebted consumers refinance their mortgage debt; and inconsistent approaches used by nations to bail out troubled banking industries and private bondholders, assuming private debt burdens or socializing losses.
ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism is a 2010 non-fiction book by Yves Smith, the pseudonymous founder of the Naked Capitalism blog. Smith was approached to write the book after her blog attracted a growing readership during the 2008 financial crisis.
The independent foreclosure review was an initiative in the United States to attempt to provide aid to homeowners who had either received their Notice of Default, or were in danger of foreclosure in early 2010's. The review was initiated as a result of the Foreclosure Crisis of 2010. The Independent Foreclosure Review provided homeowners the opportunity to request an independent review of their foreclosure process. If the review found that financial injury occurred because of errors or other problems during their home foreclosure process, the homeowners could receive compensation or other remedy.
Circle began as a peer-to-peer payments technology company that now manages stablecoin USDC, a cryptocurrency the value of which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. USDC, the second largest stablecoin worldwide, is designed to hold at or near a stable price of $1. The majority of its stablecoin collateral is held in short-term U.S. government securities.
Heather Havrilesky is an American author, essayist, and humorist. She writes the advice column "Ask Polly" for Substack. She is the author of Disaster Preparedness: A Memoir, the advice book How to Be a Person in the World and the essay collection What If This Were Enough?
Harriet Fraad is a feminist activist, psychotherapist and hypnotherapist in New York City. She has been practicing as a psychotherapist and hypnotherapist for 37 years. She is said to be a founding member of the Feminist movement, owed in part to her founding of the Women's Liberation Movement in 1968. She is the founder of the journal Rethinking Marxism and specializes in writing about the intersection between economics and psychology.