The Shrill One (tm – Brad DeLong) as Optimist: The result, then, will be high unemployment leading into the 2010 elections, and corresponding Democratic losses. These losses will be worse because Obama, by pursuing a uniformly pro-banker policy without even a gesture to popular anger over the bailouts, has ceded populist energy to the right […]

Floyd Norris is Shocked! Shocked! to Find Goldman Sachs controls Congress as well as the Treasury. Where has he been for the past three years? Imagine the reaction if, perhaps during the 1998 Asian financial crisis, a group of Republican legislators had threatened to block legislation unless a contributor to their campaigns received special treatment. […]

I would much prefer to think that all of this is a matter of his life being in turmoil throughout this decade, rather than Larry Summers being right about anything. Scott McLemee on Cornell West, with a hat tip to Henry at CT.)

We are now almost 24 months into the Great Recession. While many expect NBER will eventually say that The Great Recession ended several months ago, they have not yet. By contrast, the recession that began The Great Depression, per NBER, lasted 43 months. It seems only fair to compare the two, so I trust I […]

With all the talk of “Detroit,” you would think that Michigan would have lost the most employees, as a percentage of same, on the year. After all, the scariest graph of the U.S. MSAs isn’t scary for nothing. But the Regional and State Employment data is out for October (h/t CR), and there’s a different […]

Moody’s had always assumed banks and their securities were “Too Big to Fail.” Not any more: Moody’s Investors Service will no longer assume that holders of the securities will benefit from government support to shore up troubled lenders, after the global financial crisis proved this wasn’t the case, Moody’s said in an e-mailed statement today. […]

First, David Leonhardt argued that this recession was good for workers. Now, Floyd Norris apparently has decided to mix and match data. (I wonder if the fact many NYT employees who are looking at their 45-day severance offers is having an effect on its economic coverage.) One of the standard “economist jokes” is about the […]

I try to like the NYTimes Economics Reporting. I really do. Heck, any place that publishes Uwe Reinhardt can’t be all bad. But David Leonhardt, as he does often enough that I hesitate to read his work, again goes beyond the pale today, and clearly does so deliberately. The offending paragraph: Twenty-two months after the […]

Among the people who have been updating The Theory of Finance for the ObamaNation is Gregg Sommerville, whose job depends to some significant extent on people not believing the following riff: More music below the fold. The Bailout Rap and the Subprime Mortgage Blues

Rdan The National Academy of Social Insurance report on options for Social Security is public and now available in pdf form. “The purpose of this report is to help analysts and policymakers consider options to bring Social Security into long-term balance in ways that also address concerns about benefit adequacy.” One cannot simply glance through […]