Um.  Who knew?

I can’t help but think that Romney’s newly invigorated crony-capital (e.g., Solyndra) schtick is very much a double-edged sword for him.  I mean, isn’t he the candidate who, notwithstanding his claimed concern about the federal deficit, refuses to support the proposed elimination of the federal government’s subsidies to the oil and gas industry, and who […]

A key but seriously underemphasized factor in the near-collapse of the financial system and economy in 2008 was the role that the two largest securities-ratings firms, Moody’s and Standard and Poors, played: The two agencies routinely and deliberately overrated the value of mortgage-backed securities.  So I was momentarily (and naively) stunned to read this morning […]

Rules requiring firms to restrict employment to their country of origin would be hideously inefficient if applied on a global basis, and they would be every bit as devastating to American employees of foreign firms as offshoring by American firms is to workers who lose their jobs here. (One might also ask where the borders […]

Lost in the shuffle here is the question of what it is Romney is denying he’s responsible for. Stipulate that Romney somehow had nothing to do with running a company of which he was the CEO and sole shareholder. Does he think, in retrospect, that his subordinates did something wrong by offshoring jobs? Clearly he […]

In a comment to my post yesterday titled “Romney’s VERY Private Equity,” which asked how Romney was able to metasticze his Bain-era IRA account to accumulate more than $100 million—Investment in Apple stock?  In precious-metals funds?  A quiet Louvre heist? I asked—reader Steve Hamlin wrote: Beverly, Re: Romney’s IRA contributions, there was a WSJ article […]

By now there’s been a lot of discussion in the media about the Vanity Fair and Associated Press exposés of Romney’s and his wife’s offshore bank accounts, to the limited extent that information about them is publicly available.  Romney is now likening overseas bank accounts and shell/money-laundering corporations to investing in real overseas companies—as if […]

Seems the devil really isin the details.  Or lack thereof.  Or (in this case) both.

The second biggest surprise of the day, after the survival of the Affordable Care Act, is that we’ve never really gotten over our collective crush on John Roberts. How else to explain today’s outpouring of praise, not merely for the decision but for the man himself, for his statesmanship and judicial modesty? All these years, […]

The chief justice, echoing Justice Scalia’s “broccoli” comment at the oral argument, rejected (as did the four dissenters, and so that is now the view of a majority of the justices) the Commerce Clause ground for the mandate, saying that to accept that ground would mean that “Congress could address the diet problem by ordering […]