One of the themes that Governor Romney has been hitting at aggressively in his campaign ads is that he will get tough on China. The ads complain that China is a cheater, most importantly by “manipulating” the value of its currency. This means that China has been deliberately keeping down the value of its currency against the dollar.

A lower value for the yuan, which means a higher valued dollar, makes Chinese goods cheaper for people in the United States. It is the same thing as if China were to subsidize its exports to the United States. On the other side, the over-valuation of the dollar makes our goods more expensive to people in China, meaning that they will buy less of them. It is comparable to putting a tariff on U.S. exports to China.

Romney promises to be the tough guy who will reverse this situation. His ads claim that he will declare China to be a currency manipulator and take retaliatory measures.

President Obama has responded to Romney’s charges by pointing out that Romney personally has profited from dealings with China. His ads point out that Bain Capital, Romney’s former company, was a pioneer in outsourcing jobs to China.

While people will have to decide for themselves what they think of Romney’s business dealings in China, the Obama ad helps to clarify the issues in U.S. negotiations with China. The reality is that there are many U.S. businesses that are profiting enormously ...

The United States is getting more corrupt. So says Transparency International, which ranks the country the 16th least-corrupt in the world in 2001. By last year, the United States fell back to 24th place.

Why is corruption spreading? A recent New York Times story fingers everything from globalization to rising income inequality, as well as the growing role of corporate money in political campaigns. Yet, while corporations are spending more than ever on political campaigns, we’ve also recently seen a noticeable uptick in corporate corruption scandals.

Have corporations lost whatever ethical compass they once had? Are Americans even remotely ...

British and U.S. authorities are both now investigating Barclays and other banks for manipulating the London InterBank Offered Rate, an interest rate that is a benchmark for a host of financial products around the world. Regulators charge that the banks rigged the interest rate’s movements in order to profit and to make themselves look healthier during the financial crisis of 2008 than they actually were.

This comes on the heels of JP Morgan losing billions of dollars chasing profits with trades that were meant to reduce risk, and, of course, is just a few years removed from a crisis caused in large part by Wall Street malfeasance. But according to a survey by the whistleblower law firm Labaton Sucharow, Wall Street executives believe this is just part of the financial business. In fact, nearly one quarter of survey respondents said that financial services employees need to be unethical or engage in illegal ...

Once upon a time in a distant land, a miller boasted to his king that his daughter could spin straw into gold. Intrigued, the king locked her up in a roomful of straw and told her, “If you can spin this straw into gold by morning, you shall be my queen. If not, you shall die.”

The poor girl was at her wit’s end. She could barely spin wool, let alone straw, let alone into gold. Around midnight, a little man snuck into her room and asked, “What will you give me if I spin this straw into gold?” She gave him her necklace. By morning, when the king came to check on things, he found a room full of finely spun gold.

But, he didn’t get to be king by playing fair, so he locked the poor girl up a second night. Again the little man came and this time she gave him her ring. And again the little man spun a room-full of gold. And again, the greedy king locked her up for a third night.

This time, when the little man came around, the poor girl had nothing to give him. The little man said he would still help her—on the condition she swore to give him her first born child as a death pledge or, in the language of the land, a ‘mort-gage.’

She agreed and again the little man spun all the straw in the room into gold thread. The king took the gold as his dowry and made the girl his queen and they lived happily ever after—until the day of the birth of her first child.

The little man came back for the mort-gage. The queen wept and ...

God, Jesus, Joseph Smith, Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs), Jamie Dimon (J.P. Morgan), and Mitt Romney  welcome the Mormon Church with Angel Moroni and horn to the financial district.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the main regular of derivatives (bets on bets), wants to extend Dodd-Frank regulations to the foreign branches and subsidiaries of Wall Street banks.

Horror of horrors, say the banks.

“If JPMorgan overseas operates under different rules than our foreign competitors,” warned Jamie Dimon, chair and CEO of JP Morgan, Wall Street would lose financial business to the banks of nations with fewer regulations, allowing “Deutsche Bank to make the better deal.”

This is the same Jamie Dimon who chose London as the place to make highly-risky derivatives trades that have lost the firm upwards of $2 billion so far – and could leave American taxpayers holding the bag if JPMorgan’s exposure to tottering European banks gets much worse.

Dimon’s foreign affair is itself proof that unless the overseas operations of Wall Street banks are covered by U.S. regulations, giant banks like JPMorgan will just move more of their betting abroad – hiding their wildly-risky bets overseas so U.S. regulators can’t control them. Even now no one knows how badly JPMorgan or any other Wall Street bank will be shaken if major banks in Spain or elsewhere in Europe go down.

Call it the Dimon loophole.

This is the same Jamie Dimon, by the way, who at a financial conference a year ago told Fed chief Ben Bernanke there was no longer any reason to crack down on Wall Street. “Most of the bad actors are gone,” he said. “[O]ff-balance-sheet businesses are virtually obliterated, … money market funds are far more transparent” and “most very exotic derivatives are gone.”

One advantage of being a huge Wall Street bank is you get bailed out by the federal government when you make dumb bets. Another is you can choose where around the world to make the dumb bets, thereby dodging U.S. regulations. It’s a ...

As our political system sputters, a wave of innovative thinking and bold experimentation is quietly sweeping away outmoded economic models. In 'New Economic Visions', a special five-part AlterNet series edited by economics editor Lynn Parramore in partnership with political economist Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, creative thinkers come together to explore the exciting ideas and projects that are shaping the philosophical and political vision of the movement that could take our economy back.

Just beneath the surface of traditional media attention, something vital has been gathering force and is about to explode into public consciousness. The “New Economy Movement” is a far-ranging coming together of organizations, projects, activists, theorists and ordinary citizens committed to rebuilding the American political-economic system from the ground up.

The broad goal is democratized ownership of the economy for the “99 percent” in an ecologically sustainable and participatory community-building fashion. The name of the game is practical work in the here and now—and a hands-on process that is also informed by big picture theory and in-depth knowledge.

Thousands of real world projects—from solar-powered businesses to worker-owned cooperatives andstate-owned ...

When JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon dropped a bomb on the financial world two weeks ago by announcing that the bank had lost at least $2 billion on a series of trades that went bad on a London-based investment desk, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker (R) was among the first lawmakers to call for investigations and hearings into the trade. Today, Corker got his first chance to get some answers, as the top regulators from the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission appeared before the Senate Banking Committee.

But it wasn’t JP Morgan’s losses that Corker seemed concerned with. Instead, with advocates for stronger financial rules (including President Obama himself) pushing for a re-examination of pending regulations instituted by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, Corker was worried that the JP Morgan losses would bolster the case for a stronger Volcker Rule — the yet-to-be-finalized regulation that would ban federally-insured banks from engaging in certain types of risky trading:

CORKER: I fear that you’re under pressure, that a lot of calls are being made, that the administration is concerned that the American people are going to wake up and look at the last three years as a bad dream. … This big Dodd-Frank bill really doesn’t address real-time issues. And what you’re going to do is cause this Volcker Rule to become something that it was never intended to be.

Watch it:

Regulators are indeed facing pressure to strengthen the Volcker Rule, and as I wrote yesterday,that pressure is legitimate. Though it is unclear whether JP Morgan’s trade would have been subject to the rule, it is ...

JP Morgan’s $2 billion trading loss has renewed interest in the Volcker Rule, part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law meant to prevent banks from engaging in risky trading with federally backed dollars. Wall Street banks have been lobbying to water down the rule. In fact, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon helped open up a loophole that would allow the sort of trading that cost the bank billions.

House Republicans, of course, have been following Financial Service Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus’ (R-AL) directive to “serve the banks” by helping them in their efforts to water down and dismantle Dodd-Frank. In addition to preventing financial regulators from having the budgets necessary to do their jobs, the House GOP has been chipping away at Dodd-Frank, voting to repeal several important provisions.

But in the wake of JP Morgan’s mess, that effort has stopped, at least temporarily:

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) announced Tuesday that his panel would be postponing a Thursday markup of the bills, which would have repealed or altered provisions of the financial overhaul.

Lucas directly cited the high-profile losses of the nation’s largest bank as the reason for the delay, saying he wanted to make sure the bills would not inadvertently encourage Wall Street to take on risk haphazardly.

“As always, Washington has ...

JP Morgan Chase’s $2 billion trading loss is “exactly why Wall Street reform” is so important, President Obama said in his first interview since the bank announced the massive loss last week. Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, which could ban risky trades like the one that hit JP Morgan, in 2010.

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon announced the loss last Thursday, sparking stock losses and reminders of the 2008 financial crisis across Wall Street. In Obama’s interview, which will air this morning on ABC’s “The View,” the president referenced the federal bailout that resulted from that crisis and said a similar loss at a weaker bank may have