Political Economy

I will dispense with the commentary and let you judge for yourself.

Caroline Baum has a good column today at Bloomberg.com regarding public anger in America.  She correctly states that the American public is not just angry at Wall Street, but at what Wall Street represents in terms of special interests,…

It seems that the Obama Administration is playing hardball with GM and Chrysler. They may force the companies into bankruptcy to protect American taxpayers from having to pony up yet more money for the beleaguered automakers. I see this…

Last week, Willem Buiter sized up the U.S. and the U.K. and found their desire to enact deficit-financed fiscal stimulus not credible. The attached video does a better job of summing up the mood Buiter invokes and the need for prophylactic…

Just over a decade ago, the Bank of England was given full monetary independence from the British government, making it one of the last major central banks to achieve this status. The move was heralded as critical for maintaining…

We are barely two weeks into Barack Obama's tenure and reports are surfacing everywhere that his "team of rivals" is at each other's throat. President Obama had said just after the election that he was looking to pull together the best and…

Harry Markopolos is a fraud examiner who once worked as a fund manager. He knows fraud when he sees it and he saw it as plain as day with Bernard Madoff, who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history. In fact, he tipped off the regulators at…

The "Buy American" clause stuck onto the stimulus bill wending its way through Congress is a pernicious piece of legislation because it has engendered a ferocious response from trading partners, not the least of which is Canada. Below is a…

There is a lot of anecdotal fodder in support of my last post tagging deregulation as a root cause for the build up of excesses in the financial services industry. Let me give you one example from 1998.

There is a view making the rounds now that repealing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 is the root cause for all of the excesses we have experienced -- and by extension for the present economic Depression. Glass-Steagall was enacted in 1933…