The special legislative session in Sacramento this week is weighing the future of California’s rainy day fund, particularly how much of it should be used for paying down the state’s debt. When they’re considering the trade-offs between saving for the
I agree with Paul Krugman on at least one thing: the continued prospects for high unemployment in America is a bad thing. In his NYT column Monday, Krugman the Keynesian wrote: The damage from sustained high unemployment will last much
Perhaps Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) thinks of himself as a modern day John Sherman. In 1890, Ohio Sen. Sherman set out on a mission to establish “just competition” laws and level the economic playing field. His quest
In a somewhat surprising decision yesterday, former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Matt Tannin were found not guilty by a jury of their peers in federal court. Nearly a month to the day after their trial began,
One of the last people you’d expect to be a catalyst for the near collapse of history’s most advanced financial system is the secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Though not the masterminds of the nation’s economic woes, Andrew Cuomo
In February of this year, I wrote a study (co-authored with Mike Flynn) about the lessons of the Japanese “Lost Decade.” At the end of the 1980s, Japan faced a very similar situation to ours: an asset bubble burst, the
In the wake of the massive bank bailouts, nearly everyone is calling for some kind of financial regulatory system overhaul. The Obama administration has outlined what it would like to see and Congress is currently holding hearings on how to
When I first learned to drive as a teenager, my mother let me take the wheel on trips to the local grocery store. She was there in the passenger seat, arms flailing every time a squirrel or a piece of
We will never know how many, if any, of the major banks would have failed without the TARP bailout package passed a year ago. Several banks were strong-armed into taking the money. We can be reasonably sure that Citigroup and
President Obama recently reiterated his plan to fix the regulation of Wall Street and said it was time to “put an end to the idea that some firms are too big to fail.” Amen. But the president doesn’t need a
The point of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was to encourage national economic growth. The point was to curb unemployment. The point was to help small businesses be what D.C. has forever claimed they are–the national economic backbone. The
During the campaign in 2008, President Obama made his tax message as clear as it could be: he wanted to tax the wealthy, and help the poor. He promised over and over that taxes on those making less than $250,000
Riding the wave of the GOP’s successful push to have Congress defund Acorn, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) tried to push through another prudential budget matter: killing the John Murtha-Johnstown Cambria County Airport. His effort was not as successful. On Thursday
As Congress prepares to move forward on financial services regulation, it’s worth taking a step back to look at the proposals for what they really are: behavioral control mechanisms. This is not to say that regulation is inherently bad. A
President Obama appeared at Federal Hall in New York yesterday to reiterate his support for a massive overhaul of financial services regulation. At the center of the speech the president laid out his economic philosophy: I have always been a