regulation

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently defended the Federal Reserve’s low-interest rate monetary policy which preceded the housing bubble in the United States. Bernanke instead pointed to a lack of regulatory controls as the major…

As a writer, Matt Taibbi is a lot more vitriolic than I am. He curses, makes some pretty over-the-top personal attacks, and divines a policymaker’s intent where I don’t think he can. But, this goes mostly to style.  Substantively…

Marshall Auerback here with a commentary on Robert Rubin’s recent Newsweek article on getting the economy back on track. As we all know, during his tenure as Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin laid the groundwork for today's crisis through…

Byron Wien was amazingly accurate last year in his economic predictions even though his annual list is an attempt to build a non-consensus list of likely outlier events. So, I was eager to see Byron Wien's 2010 surprises, which were…

I will have some commentary on this in a future post or an updated version of this one. Update 1600 ET: you can see my commentary in the next post here. The Surprises of 2010 The United States economy grows at a stronger than expected…

I don’t know quite what to make of the Paul Volcker interview published late last week in Business Week.  In case you missed it, Business Week published a frank interview of former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker with media…

Robin Hanson makes this assertion in a recent post in his blog “Overcoming Bias.” I found his argument as to why this is so pretty provocative. Yesterday, I had actually linked out to an article at Science Daily on why powerful people don’t…

As we head into the New Year, I am trying to look back at the last one with some semblance of a coherent interpretation of events that leads to a strategic vision of the future.  I have already touched on stimulus, kleptocracy and…

Before the Christmas break, I wrote a post to tie together my thoughts on why I have found the Obama economic program so unsatisfying despite some obvious success in stabilizing the economy. This first part framed the status quo as an…

Great article in this week’s Barron’s featuring commentary from a number of distinguished market observers including our own Marshall Auerback and Baseline Scenario’s Simon Johnson (hat tip Barry Ritholtz). The last of the big banks…