Political Economy

While most economists have come out in favor of Barack Obama’s decision to re-appoint Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Stephen Roach has penned an Op-Ed in today’s Financial Times which highlights the case against…

Below is a copy of the actual judgment in the Bloomberg News vs. Fed FOIA case.  The case is: Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan), No.…

This from the Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel: President Barack Obama will announce Tuesday that he is nominating Ben Bernanke for a second four-year term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel…

This just in from Bloomberg: The Federal Reserve must make public reports about recipients of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers under programs created to address the financial crisis, a federal judge ruled. The case is: Bloomberg LP…

Now that it has emerged from bankruptcy and received free money from the Federal Government, General Motors is seriously thinking about keeping Opel by raising capital.  The German government has been urging GM to make a decision about…

I intended to write this post about high frequency trading. The idea was to link to a very enlightening podcast that aired yesterday on “Taking Stock” with Pimm Fox on Bloomberg Radio. Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge was on the program talking…

The bailouts, deficit spending, and debate over health care are having a very nasty negative effect on the electoral fortunes of the Democratic party. Charlie Cook, a well-known and respected election pundit, writes (emphasis added):…

Jesse of Jesse's Café Américain posted on the important subject of deregulation in his last post, “Why the Austrian, Keynesian, Marxist, Monetarist, and Neo-Liberal Economists Are All Wrong.” In it, he opined that it is entirely…

Yesterday I wrote a healthcare polemic which was mostly designed to discuss the politics of healthcare for the President. The essence of my argument was that Barack Obama has not shown enough willingness to fight for specific policies he…

The conventional wisdom is that the US is beholden to foreign agents as they hold much of the US government debt.  In this view, if these agents sell their securities, interest rates in America should increase as demand for US public debt…