Aram Zucker-Scharff

Subprime loans are making a comeback, and it’s a disaster:

“But if houses don’t become cheaper and wages don’t rise, what is actually achieved by making it easier for people to go into debt to buy them?”

A: Inflation! Making bankers richer! The totally foreseeable detonation of the worldwide economy!

Oh wait…. is this one of those rhetorical questions?

“”This is a system of trafficking in women. It is, of course, consensual, and a far cry from anything like sexual slavery. But, in an anthropological sense, it is not so different from the tribal kinship systems studied by Claude Lévi-Strauss, in which men exchanged women in order to forge alliances with other men, while women were cut out from the value that their own circulation generated.””

– Who Runs the Girls?

“”Who’d want to buy dozens of newspapers? The industry’s print advertising revenue is in barely controlled freefall, down eight percent a year since 2011; this budget season’s now-familiar gut-wrenching forecast for 2015 is the same. Paywall-related revenue and digital advertising initiatives have only partially offset that loss. Consequently, figure it’s been 84 months or so of unending downward revenue trajectory; 2007 was the last year of significant revenue growth. Only deep cost-cutting, including the downsizing of America’s daily newsrooms by 30 percent or 20,000 jobs, has maintained high single-digit to to low-double-digit profitability. How long can that strategy last before the last print subscriber cancels in frustration?””

– The newsonomics of auctioning off Digital First’s newspapers (and California schemin’).