How Donald Trump is Channeling Machiavelli
This past weekend, Donald Trump and JD Vance accused their Democratic opponents of plotting to kill Trump, implicitly threatening to prosecute them should they win. As shocking as it sounds, it was unremarkable since personal threats are a common and menacing feature of their campaign. Since Trump announced his bid for a second term, he has threatened to investigate and… Continue reading
Efficient Markets and the Economic Meltdown
I found myself this week addressing the chairman of the SEC and three other commissioners at a forum on short sales, and the discussion illustrated how much the attitudes of some lag behind the realities of our current crisis. After the repeated meltdowns of numerous markets over the past year, the open minds at the forum belonged to the members…Continue reading
Administration Out on a Limb for GM — and for…
As Churchill famously said of democracy, the administration’s new plans for General Motors are a dismal idea, except for all of the alternatives. Under the plan, GM has to come up with a detailed strategy by June 1 that plausibly will allow it to survive and so receive nearly $12 billion more from the taxpayers, or file for bankruptcy. By…Continue reading
Administration Out on a Limb for GM — and for…
As Churchill famously said of democracy, the administration’s new plans for General Motors are a dismal idea, except for all of the alternatives. Under the plan, GM has to come up with a detailed strategy by June 1 that plausibly will allow it to survive and so receive nearly $12 billion more from the taxpayers, or file for bankruptcy. By…Continue reading
The Political Challenges We Face To Preserve the Earth
It’s Earth Day as I write this, and the challenges to preserve the Earth as we know it are momentous ones. The biggest and most obvious one is climate change, since it involves the most serious threat. Getting Congress to pass a plan that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to be meaningful will be a very tall order. The…Continue reading
How the Housing Crisis Can Change National Attitudes
The Great Depression deeply affected the attitudes of the generation that came of age in the 1920s and 1930s. For example, it made the country thriftier and more Democratic. It took two full generations for other social changes to turn us into a society that was more Republican and saved much less — shifts led, as before, by those who…Continue reading
Time to Face the Facts: The Economy Probably Won’t Get…
Brace yourself for a very anxious and stormy time, economically and politically, because there’s little prospect that the U.S. economy will improve for quite some time. The latest to weigh in is the Federal Reserve, whose new private forecast sees no growth in sight for the rest of this year and slow gains at best for 2010. The Fed always…Continue reading
Is Cap-and-Trade a Dead Policy Walking?
In his February 24 speech to Congress, President Obama asked members “to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution.†So, yesterday, House Energy and Commerce chair Henry Waxman took the first step by introducing his cap-and-trade plan. Yet sometimes, the political sands shift underneath a policy approach that was once viable, even embraced broadly, and its…Continue reading
Treasury’s New Program Mixes Sound Economics and Wishful Thinking
The administration’s new program to wring the toxic assets out of the banking system is a huge bet, which, like most of the previous reforms for the current crisis, is based equally on sound economics and a good dose of wishful thinking. The truth is, it couldn’t be otherwise: We’ve never experienced this kind of crisis before, so we cannot…Continue reading