I hadn’t read Taibbi’s reporting about a jaw-dropping series of events in 2004-05 involving White until just now, when I read his article posted today on the Rolling Stone website, summarizing them. Call me naive–which is what I’m calling myself–but the article really shocked me. I wonder who recommended White to Obama. White surely […]
J.W. Mason at The Slack Wire gives us a telling and trenchant analysis of that question: Short answer: They used to, but not any more. The correlation in the U.S. between fixed-capital investment and a) debt levels and b) change in debt levels has been vanishingly small since the late eighties. …in the 1960s and […]
I’ve spent yesterday and this morning saying here that I suspect that Geithner played some role in persuading Obama himself to decide that the Justice Dept. should not do much to investigate whether there was criminal conduct by top execs at the big banks, the big investment banks, and the big mortgage companies–but also saying, […]
BREUER: “If you look at what we and the U.S. attorney community did, I think you have to take a step back. Over the last couple of years, we have convicted Raj Rajaratnam, one of the largest hedge fund leaders. Now, you’ll say that’s an insider trading case, but it’s clearly going after Wall Street.”* […]
Brad DeLong notices the vagaries of the theories of the mooschers class: Now politicians like Paul Ryan who used to say things like: Right now about 60 percent of the American people get more benefits in dollar value from the federal government than they pay back in taxes. So we’re going to a majority of […]
by Linda Beale Much of MNEs’ “offshore” (and hence untaxed) cash hoards held onshore The Wall Street Journal, in its editorial pages a great friend to big business and low taxes for same, had a decent front-page article on the corporate hoard of cash designated as “permanently invested offshore”. In fact, much of that cash […]
James Tilson and Robert E. Prasch follow the money at New Economic Perspectives regarding the AIG bailout and a more accurate sense of costs. “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” This old adage came to mind on December 11, 2012 when the U.S. Treasury made the announcement, reiterated unthinkingly by the […]
After reading Ken Houghton’s post immediately below, and then clicking on the Twitter exchange that Ken, Dan and Yves referenced, in which the Frontline reporter, Martin Smith, said he’d received a call from the Justice Department saying that the reporter had come with an agenda and that the Obama Justice Department would not again cooperate […]
Just a quick one: I was wrong; Greg Sargent and Stan Collender were correct. And, yes, I could not be happier about this, though I still expect that any real evidence of Moderate Republican Senators will show up about the same time as a flock of Ugly Chickens (link not guaranteed to work; reference discussed […]
The disgusting Lanny Breuer–a Clinton-era big-wig–is heavily featured in Glenn Greenwald’s article. But of course the weak, ineffectual Eric Holder, and Obama himself, are even greater culprits on this. A key reason why Obama’s first term was such a disappointment was that, in the worst ways, it was Bill Clinton’s third term. Obama basically […]