Now this is reassuring.
Bad News For The Bailout — Forbes.com
In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.
“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
Thus Dean Baker.
Leonhardt is Wrong, Limiting CEO Pay is Not a Sideshow to This Bailout
In his weekly NYT column, David Leonhardt argues that limits on executive compensation are a sideshow to the bank bailout. Actually, they are an essential part of the story.
A key issue in the bailout is addressing moral hazard. The [...]
The “New” New Deal
I am having a hard time keeping up with all of the bailouts and special facilities created for dealing with this crisis. Am I missing any?
Bear Stearns
Economic Stimulus progam
Housing Bailout Program
Fannie & Freddie
AIG
No Short selling rules
Fed liquidity programs (Term Lending facility, Term Auction facility)
Money Market fund insurance program
New RTC type [...]
You Have To Be Shitting Me:
This is unbelievable:
The federal government is working on a sweeping series of programs that would represent perhaps the biggest intervention in financial markets since the 1930s, embracing the need for a comprehensive approach to the financial crisis after a series of ad hoc rescues.
At the center of the potential [...]
Wednesday is Constitution Day; here’s Sandy Levinson (Our Undemocratic Constitution).
Faux Originalism and “Constitution Day”
Many originalists claim to feel bound not only by the text of the Constitution (which would make them only textualists, but also by the values, aims, and aspirations of the Founders). But surely one of the central values of the Founders is [...]
George Saunders in The New Yorker.
My Gal
In summary: Because my candidate, unlike your winking/blinking Vice-Presidential candidate, who, though, yes, he did run as the running mate when the one asking him to run did ask him to run, which that I admire, one thing he did not do, with his bare hands or otherwise, is, [...]
George Friedman in the New York Review of Books. Certainly the clearest exposition of recent events in Georgia that I’ve come across.
Georgia and the Balance of Power
The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It has simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. The United States [...]
As a rule I’m content to trust that my small band of readers will follow the excellent Dean Baker on their own (he’s the Beat the Press link on my Links list). But from time to time, I can’t resist reposting. This post recapitulates one of Baker’s themes, that the notion that corporate dividends are [...]
There are any number of polling sites around the net covering the presidential campaign. David Moore lists some of the more popular ones. Who’s David Moore?
David Moore, author of The Opinion Makers: An Insider Reveals the Truth Behind the Polls, is a former Vice President of the Gallup Organization and Managing Editor of the Gallup [...]
Starting today, George Orwell’s diaries start appearing as a blog, 70 years after they were written (you may recall a similar project some time back blogging the diaries of Samuel Pepys). By way of introduction:
From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual [...]
I’ve been meaning to link to Voteview for a while now. It’s a project of Keith T Poole, now at UCSD, that ranks congressfolk on a liberal-to-conservative scale based on their voting history. There’s lots to browse, but the rankings themselves are as interesting as anything on the site. Check out the 110th Senate, for [...]
Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke.
Helmuth von Moltke was at a meeting at the Foreign Minstry in Berlin with twenty-four men. They discussed a legal decree that would expropriate the property of deported Jews. Twenty-four of the twenty-five wanted to approve the decree; Moltke opposed it.
The men were chameleons, Moltke wrote his wife: “In a healthy [...]
David Kaiser: Facts are stubborn things
A couple of days ago President Bush ignited a firestorm before the Knesset by attacking those who support talking with hostile foreign leaders as practitioners of appeasement. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939,” he said, “an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, [...]
Glenn Greenwald: Tom Friedman’s latest declaration of war
So congratulations to us. After years of desperately searching, we’ve finally found our New Soviet Union. Nay-saying opponents of the New War … may try to point out that it’s a country whose defense spending is less than 1% of our own, has never invaded another country, and [...]
Dean Baker on one of his favorite subjects, the attribution of ideological motivations to political actors, quoted here mainly for its fine last line.
Frank-Dodd Bailouts: Arithmetic, Not Ideology
It is remarkable how often reporters/columnists feel the need to assert that political disputes are about ideological issues. Why do they feel the need to make assertions for [...]
James Hamilton speculates on the consequences of a US move to a gold standard in 2006.
What if we’d been on the gold standard?:
If the U.S. had decided to go back on the gold standard in 2006, where would we be today? That’s a question my friend Randy Parker recently asked me. Here’s how we both [...]
Deep Antarctic waters freshening
April 18, 2008
Sydney Daily Telegraph
Scientists studying the icy depths of the sea around Antarctica have detected changes in salinity that could have profound effects on the world’s climate and ocean currents. . . Voyage leader Steve Rintoul said his team found that salty, dense water that sinks near the edge of Antarctica [...]
Jeffrey Birnbaum in the Washington Post. No comment is really required, is it?
The pharmaceutical industry, long an ally of Republicans, has increasingly worked itself into the good graces of the Democratic Party and by doing so has helped block the Democrats’ top prescription-drug initiatives.
In the year since they took over on Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders [...]
Aidan Hartley in the NY TImes.
John Stuart Mill addresses this problem in Representative Government, sounding, to our ears, more than a little paternalistic. But surely it’s also true that elections are a necessary but not sufficient element of a democratic society.
Democracy by Other Means
Kenyan democracy has failed because ordinary people were encouraged to believe [...]
A while back, Dean Baker wrote a piece in response to a NY Times review of Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capital. It’s all worth reading (as usual), but along the way Baker touches on the claim, made in the context of various attempts to “reform” Social Security, that the [...]