Although it hasn’t gotten much attention in the business press yet, the House Financial Services Committee is on the warpath to clean up subprime mortgage lending. Most of their ideas, such as tighter regulation of mortgage brokers, strike observers as reasonable. But one has created a great deal of alarm. The concept is “assignee liability,” […]
Read more...So far, it hasn’t gotten much attention in the mainstream business press, but Bloomberg and the Financial Times are very much on top of the story: the House Financial Services Committee is moving forward with proposals to impose new regulations on subprime lending. And Democrats and Republicans are largely on the same page. There are […]
Read more...This comment came from a reader in response to our post “The Private Sector Isn’t Always Cheaper/Better (Student Loan Edition)” which discussed the fact that the student loan program administered through banks costs $7 more per $100 loan than loans provided directly, and what an incredibly rich fee/expense level that was for a debt product.I […]
Read more...Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Progress has focused on the issue of productivity, both in the current business cycle (he sees its decline as an underreported negative indicator) and longer term. A post on his blog Beat the Press points to a recent paper of his on productivity and reaches some […]
Read more...We have yet another instance of the Journal putting a happier face on the news than the Financial Times, this time on the slowly escalating US-China trade dispute. By way of background, we reported earlier on the US’s imposition of punitive duties on Chinese, Indonesian, and South Korean coated paper because these countries were determined […]
Read more...It’s become such an article of faith that the private sector is better than the government at doing just about everything that those who want the government to take a more active role here and there are put on the defensive. But the using the private sector to promote public goals can be more costly […]
Read more...A Ministry of Defense team has been envisioning what the world might look like in 30 years (as an aside, no one in the private sector takes such a long view), and what it sees is not pretty. Terrorism will remain an ongoing threat, with intermittent, possibly coordinated attacks of greater intensity than now. Other […]
Read more...Not much, it seems. This is from Andrew Sullivan, a card-carrying conservative, via Brad DeLong: Meet Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton University. He’s a former Marine, with five years of active service and 19 years in the reserve, and a legal critic of Roe vs Wade and supporter of the Alito confirmation. He’s […]
Read more...Mark Thoma has featured an excellent LA Times commentary by Ezra Klein, “This time, we want health care reform.” Klein highlights the fundamental challenge of any reform proposal – what do you do with the incumbents, the insurers, big Pharma, the big hospitals – and what process do you use to either gain their support […]
Read more...I don’t know how to characterize the state of the media in the US. A controlled press? Self-censorship? Whatever the cause, the result is that important stories are so often watered down that the kid-gloves treatment comes perilously close to misreporting. This isn’t news to any close reader of the US press. But it is […]
Read more...A post at Free Exchange, the Economist’s blog, which quotes and elaborates on one by Tyler Cowen, posits that Europeans are better at government because they have more homogeneous societies and talent pools, and therefore Europeans choose to consume more government. Americans are better at things like private sector innovation, and therefore its population demands […]
Read more...An interesting article in Econbrowser, “More speculation about Saudi Arabia,” highlights the issue of falling Saudi oil output and what its causes might be. The debate centers around whether this fall is intentional, that is, whether the Saudis are taking wells out of production, or whether it reflects a decline in the productivity of Saudi […]
Read more...Paul Krugman’s current offering in the New York Times, “Distract and Disenfranchise,” seeks to connect the dots between the Bush Administration’s very successful (until recently) fear-mongering, voter disenfranchisement, and income inequality. He argues that the fact that the Republicans are captive to interests that won’t permit them to address income inequality requires that they make […]
Read more...This excellent article by Robert Knutter in the American Prospect, “Friendly Takeover,” is required reading for anyone who cares about either the Democratic party or social democracy (it is also featured in Economist’s View). It describes how Robert Rubin succeeded in getting the Democrats to adopt many of the practices of Eisenhower Republicans, most importantly, […]
Read more...Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary, defined an alliance as, “When two thieves have their hands so deeply plunged into each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third party.” We seem to be in that position with China. The problem is that we’d like to renegotiate our “alliance,” but we are trying to […]
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