This is another summer rerun piece. I wrote the following post “If the U.S. stopped issuing treasuries, would it go broke?” in November 2009. At the time, I was getting to grip with how the government designed constraints in order to prevent deficit spending. What was and still is clear to me is that while […]
Read more...Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns According to Der Spiegel, Helmut Kohl, the father of a unified Germany and the German politician most responsible for the single currency, is very unhappy with his protégé Angela Merkel. I found this article to be consistent with what I have heard for months about the Kohl-Waigel generation’s feelings about Merkel’s […]
Read more...By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. His Twitter feed is @matthewstoller.
Last week, I caught some of the grilling of Elizabeth Warren by GOP Congressmen during the House Oversight Reform Hearing. At one point, a Republican Congressmen asked Warren if she was “running a campaign” to convince people of the validity of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau she is in the midst of setting up. The two of them went back and forth, because she didn’t really understand the question. He was trying to peg her as overtly political, using government resources to travel the country and do advocacy. Suddenly, she got the nature of the question, and turned to him and said, pointedly, “I always try to convince people that I’m right.”
There was some laughter in the room, but she wasn’t kidding.
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager
For once, President Obama has sought to address his progressive critics, without caricaturing them as a bunch of out of touch, irresponsible radicals. At his press conference on Friday, the President made the following argument:
Read more...In a segment on the Dylan Ratigan show (hat tip Joe Costello), the normally fire-breathing Mark Ames set forth a policy program that plans to use Grover Norquist tactics to bring back Eisenhower era policies.
Enjoy!
Read more...The police force investigating the alleged £1 billion fraud at the former Reading operation of HBOS has no plans to probe the possible role of former senior executives and board directors in the scandal.
Read more...Antidote du jour: I wanted to put this up for cat owners, but Youtube embeds and Wordpress still don’t coexist happily. So here’s a link instead.
NB: this works on most cats, but if you are the proud owner of a Maine Coon, watch out: he will still carve the vet’s forearm to shreds.
Read more...We are in the process of seeking recommendations for our inaugural FEMA Awards for Exceptional Financial Crisis Management. We must thank our reader Swedish Lex for providing the inspiration for establishing these prizes.
We are looking for nominees in each category. We have provided some illustrative candidates for specific prizes. Readers are also encouraged to suggest additional categories if they feel we have overlooked noteworthy types of crisis behavior that are worthy of recognition.
Our initial categories:
Read more...We have said for some time Warren was not going to get head the new consumer financial protection agency. Obama was not willing to ruffle the banks, and Geithner, who is is most powerful Cabinet member, would not stand for it). Nevertheless, we are disappointed by this outcome. And it seems a bit churlish for this news to be leaked the day after she ran the gauntlet with the House Oversight Panel. From Bloomberg:
Read more...Lordie, I can’t believe someone who professes to understand markets has written, at length, that caution, no, “excess of overcaution,” was a major contributor to the criss. Or has Felix Salmon been spending too much time with lobbyists from ISDA and SIFMA?
I hate seeming rude, but Felix has a habit of tearing into Gretchen Morgenson for errors much less significant than the one he made in a post today. He wrote, apropos this chart, which comes from FT Alphaville:
Read more...Here’s what Germany’s largest daily newspaper Bild Zeitung has to say about the politics in the US around the debt ceiling: "Playing poker is part of politics, as is theatrical posturing. That’s fair enough. But what America is currently exhibiting is the worst kind of absurd theatrics. And the whole world is being held hostage. […]
Read more...Hi all. Here’s another summer re-run I wanted to post at NC, but this time from Marshall Auerback. As you know, there has been a heated debate amongst economists as to what policy makers should do if anything about the loss of jobs and the attendant fall in demand and output in the wake of […]
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