Bailout and Financial Crisis News

The reform that President Obama made a centerpiece of his campaign for financial regulation earlier this year gets the short shrift in the bill proposed by Senator Chris Dodd today. The so-called “Volcker Rule” which would prohibit banks from proprietary trading or investing in hedge funds and private equity funds will not become part of [...]

Four congressional procedure experts: Reconciling With the Past: THOMAS E. MANN, NORMAN J. ORNSTEIN, RAFFAELA WAKEMAN and FOGELSON-LUBLINER: WITH President Obama and Congressional Democrats intent on one last push for health care reform, the main Republican talking point is outrage over the likely use of the reconciliation process to pass a separate House-Senate compromise. The Republicans’ [...]

Clive Crook, February 10, 2009: Fiscal stimulus: repent at leisure: The administration was right to press for a big fiscal stimulus, I think, and it is better to have the bill that emerged from Congress than none. (The FT called it ugly but necessary: I couldn’t have put it better myself.) Still, if ever a rushed [...]

1) Jeff’s Cheap Talk: Your Brain Wants You To Help The Poor. Are You Listening?: In a paper in Nature; the authors Tricomi, Rangel, Camerer, and O’Doherty used fMRI experiments to reveal that the brain is wired for egalitarianism. 'Activity rose in rich people when their poor colleagues got money. In fact, it was [...]

(This guest post originally appeared at NewDeal2.0) We’ve persistently taken the view that there is no economic doctrine, no magic number, which would imply a firm external constraint as far as public spending goes, when dealing with a sovereign government issuing debt its own floating rate, non-convertible currency. At some point, we may indeed have a [...]

Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps? In today’s Washington Post, Jason Horowitz writes: Hotheaded Emanuel may be White House voice of reason: Rahm Emanuel is officially a Washington caricature. He’s the town’s resident leviathan, a bullying, bruising White House chief of staff who is a prime target for the failings of the Obama [...]

1) Oliver Colbion and Yuri Gorodnichenko: When will the Fed raise interest rates?: p [P]rofessional forecasters are predicting that the 3-month T-bill rate… will be nearly 1% by the end of 2010 and over 2% by the end of 2011…. The market view is thus that the zero bound on interest rates will stop binding by [...]

“Enough,” he says: Forget bipartisanship Obama: shoot for the moon: The problem started even before he was inaugurated. Mr Obama was faced with two conflicting objectives. First, try to revive a rapidly sinking economy by crafting a big fiscal stimulus – one that should be “timely, targeted and temporary” in the words of Lawrence Summers, Mr [...]

1) David Leonhardt: Health Economists Urge Passage of Reform: Obviously, not all economists are in favor of the current proposals in Congress. But a pretty impressive list of health economists and other policy experts has released a letter making the following argument: We commend the President’s pursuit of bipartisan solutions. Yet the summit made plain that [...]

Before you get too excited about the new federal rules on nasty credit card practices going into effect Monday, consider this: there are still plenty of ways to get screwed.  Nine months ago, President Obama signed the Credit CARD Act, which ended practices like “any time for any reason” increases on existing balances or [...]

« Previous entries