by Ken Houghton Brad DeLong lays out the breakdown. When 2/3 of your party believes that taking the Dow down 600 750+ points is a Good Idea, claims such as “the party of fiscal responsibility”—or even the “party of Wall Street”—fail the free market test Big Time. If I weren’t worried about the coming harvest, […]

Joseph Stilgitz asks tough questions at The Nation: The champagne bottle corks were popping as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced his trillion-dollar bailout for the banks, buying up their toxic mortgages. To a skeptic, Paulson’s proposal looks like another of those shell games that Wall Street has honed to a fine art. Wall Street has […]

The Center for Policy and Research sent us a note on a new report about whether we are better off now than eight years ago.

by cactus Rent Control and the Current Financial Mess – A Look at an Incredibly Silly Story There’s a trope going around among libertarians and many Republicans– I’ve seen it in a few places – that the mess on Wall Street is due to excessive regulation. This tripe by Richard Epstein in Forbes.com is a […]

by Divorced one like Bush Before we get to excited about Ms. Parker’s recent calling out, consider her 9/5 opinion in What Sarah Palin brings to the Republican Party: And relief that the first Republican woman on a presidential ticket wasn’t going to let them down. No one was going to be embarrassed by John […]

Mark Thomawrites a reminder that there is more to news than the bailout, and makes connections.

By Bruce Andrew Biggs directs our attention to a new detailed PRA plan by Mark Warshawsky, a member of the Social Security Advisory Board: Notes on SS Reform: Actuaries Score New Reform Proposal The post does not link to the plan itself but instead to a detailed scoring of it by the Office of the […]

by Rdan Calculated Risk and many others note that a tentative agreement might be done, details to follow to day perhaps, ‘before the opening of the Asian markets’. Barney Frank, a hometown citizen wants a clearer explanation than it is a compromise on a compromise agreement needing to be passed by tomorrow. Please convince me […]

Bloomberg carries this bit of news for us to chew on: Wall Street’s five biggest firms paid more than $3 billion in the last five years to their top executives, while they presided over the packaging and sale of loans that helped bring down the investment-banking system. Merrill Lynch & Co. paid its chief executives […]

Sept. 27 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Congress gave final approval to legislation providing the auto industry with $25 billion in loans, lifting an offshore oil-drilling ban and funding the government until the next president takes office.The legislation, approved by the Senate 78-12, spends $602 billion for the departments of defense, homeland security and veterans affairs. […]