Johnson and Kwak hit the big time: a Washington Post column on the anniversary of the Lehman failure. Like most people, they take the position that letting Lehman fail was a mistake. It is a curious read side by side with Cochrane and Zingales’ Wall Street Journal piece, which includes this blast from the already-cloudy [...]
Archive for September, 2009
Hazards
Posted in Meltdown, Obama, Tim Geithner on September 16, 2009 | 7 Comments »
No, Mind If I Fart?
Posted in Drugs, Foreigners, Miscellaneous on September 15, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Marc Ambinder and Crooked Timber reflect on the oddest aspect of tobacco regulations: they work. I would have predicted that the ban would never work in pubs. But it did – pretty well instantaneously as best as I could tell. If it hadn’t been for the Irish example, I would have bet even larger amounts [...]
Perspective
Posted in Dick Cheney, Foreigners, George W. Bush, Military, Obama, War on Terror on September 14, 2009 | 10 Comments »
Undeterred by his own attorney general and common sense, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon intends to prosecute Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Douglas Feith, William Haynes, Jay Bybee, and David Addington (collectively, the “Bush Six”) for their role in providing the legal framework for Guantanamo: On Saturday, however, Público reported that Judge Garzón had accepted a lawsuit [...]
Reform Week: Foreign Policy
Posted in Dick Cheney, Foreigners, George W. Bush, Middle East, Military, Obama, South Asia, War on Terror, Weapons of Mass Destruction on September 11, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Eight years.
Reform Week: Sports
Posted in Baseball, Basketball, Football, Golf, Hockey, Labor Policy, Soccer, Sports on September 10, 2009 | 8 Comments »
Football season is just about here, and the Denver Broncos have already outdone themselves in bizarre offseason maneuvers. As I mentioned here, the team decided to fire a two-time Super Bowl winner with a career 146-95 record who had the #2 team in total yardage last year despite losing seven running backs and starting a [...]
Reform Week: Health Care
Posted in Health Care, Industrial Policy, Joe Lieberman, Labor Policy, Obama on September 9, 2009 | 12 Comments »
The health care debate is fascinating. While the bailout and subsequent financial adventures entailed a language most Representatives could not even comprehend, most everyone with a pulse believes he understands the health care industry, and being wrong is no impediment. Reminds me of the old and undoubtedly apocryphal tale: Reporter goes to Appalachia in 1964 [...]
Reform Week: Finance Industry
Posted in Finance, Meltdown on September 8, 2009 | 27 Comments »
It has been a year since the Federal government absorbed Fannie and Freddie and crossed, however unknowingly, the Rubicon of nationalizing the consequences of private risk-taking. A few weeks later we had Lehman, and then immediately the drunken fire brigade: Reserve Fund, AIG, the conversion of Goldman and Morgan Stanley, and TARP and its variants. [...]
Stop Digging
Posted in Housing Crisis, Housing Policy, Meltdown, Tim Geithner on September 4, 2009 | 13 Comments »
Courtesy of Calculated Risk, a fantastic example of the government’s inability to grasp the root cause of our economic woes: The Federal Housing Administration, hit by increasing mortgage-related losses, is in danger of seeing its reserves fall below the level demanded by Congress…”They’re probably going to need a bailout at some point because they’re making [...]
This Is PBS
Posted in Health Care, Olympics, Soccer, Television on September 3, 2009 | 5 Comments »
WinSmith over at Daily Kos brings up a good point: if it is so impossible for private industry to compete with the government, how public television did not destroy commercial television? In fact, how come PBS has had such little impact?
Uncomfortable
Posted in Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Obama, War on Terror, Weapons of Mass Destruction on September 2, 2009 | 25 Comments »
I hate Dick Cheney. I cannot imagine a more disgusting combination of power and venality in American politics. We have more than our share of scum over the years, but whether by luck or by horse sense we have managed to keep the worst of them out of high office. Sarah Palin lost. Ronald Reagan [...]
