Political Economy

If you recall, a few months ago there was a lot of speculation in Washington about Paul Volcker being named a 'car czar' to deal with the problem with the Big Three automakers. That idea has fallen by the wayside. President Obama has named…

Danielle, a European reader, recently asked what is going on in the European Union regarding mark-to-market. Basically, the EU has already relaxed mark-to-market requirements as an outgrowth of the market turbulence surrounding Lehman…

After Iceland collapsed and went into Depression, there were a number of reports in the press regarding countries with outsized financial sectors. The worry was that the collapse of Iceland was not an isolated incident, but rather a…

A recent note from Time Magazine's blog, Swampland: This looks real bad, both for Roland Burris and his country. First a quick recap: Burris gets appointed to the Senate by Rod Blagojevich, a self-made cartoon of political ineptness and…

C-Span ranks the former Presidents: Honest Abe gets top billing, follwed by Washington, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt and Truman. How did the George Bushes, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan do? Click the link to find out.

The title of this post is fairly provocative and categorical. This is by design. For I see Obama's banking plan as more of the same -- not 'change we can believe in.' And we all need to be clear about the need for Obama and his team to…

Here, Maxine Waters, a U.S. Congresswoman from Los Angeles gets hot under the collar about the banking industry given its predatory lending (credit cards and housing) in her constituency. You may remember she was very skeptical about the…

Politico asked a bunch of pundits from across the political spectrum to size up U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's performance in explaining his plan for rescuing the U.S. banking system. They were asked, "Did Tim Geithner blow it? What…

A condition of conflict or anxiety resulting from inconsistency between one's duty as regulator and one's actions

Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has issued a damning assessment of the Geithner bailout package. His main criticism is that Geithner's aims are the same narrow set of goals set out by the Bush Administration of working through this…