April 2010
15 posts
Swiftboating Finance Reform
Republicans are blocking a Senate vote on the Dodd bill, seeking to build public support by misleading the public. They’re claiming to want a stronger bill when in fact they’re doing the Street’s bidding by seeking a weaker one.
Evidence of their tactics comes in the form of a shady anti-financial reform group called “Stop Too Big To Fail” which today announced a new...
The Importance of Getting Wall Street Out of...
Washington’s relationship with Wall Street is growing more schizophrenic by the day. On the one hand, Congress is trying to show how tough it can be on the financial sector by enacting a law ostensibly designed to prevent another near-meltdown and taxpayer-supported bail-out. As the mid-term election looms, a staggering number of Americans remain unemployed or underemployed, and most Americans...
Obama's Supreme Court Nomination, the Economy, and...
As the President ponders who he’ll nominate to the Supreme Court, it occurred to me that my Senate testimony against the confirmation of John Roberts in September 2005 might be of some use in thinking about the kind of person America needs in that office, and who it doesn’t. Herewith:
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How Justices of the Supreme Court interpret the Constitution and federal and state laws is not...
A Short Citizen's Guide to Reforming Wall Street
The real scandal isn’t the Street’s unlawful acts (i.e., Securities and Exchange Commission vs. Goldman Sachs) but legal acts that have reaped the Street a bonanza and nearly sunk the rest of us.
It’s good we finally have an SEC on which three out of five commissioners are willing to enforce laws already on the books. Hopefully other enforcement agencies (CFTC, FDIC, and the...
Mitch McConnell Gets it Wrong
CANDY CROWLEY (CNN, Sunday): The president says you are being deceptive in describing this bill. MCCONNELL: Well, Candy … there is a bailout fund in the bill that was reported out of the Banking Committee, the partisan bill that came out of committee on a party-line vote. CROWLEY: But that still does not— MCCONNELL: I don’t think that’s in dispute. CROWLEY: But that bailout is...
The Only Way to Prevent Another Bailout of Wall...
The best way for Senate Dems and the White House to respond to the Republican charge that the Dem plan for financial reform doesn’t go far enough to prevent another bailout is to call their bluff — and simultaneously do what’s necessary to avoid another bailout: Cap the size of big banks, as the UK is close to doing for its big banks.
The so-called “resolution”...
C-SPAN, Washington Journal, April 13, 2010 →
Robert Reich discusses his recent piece in the Wall Street Journal about outsourced jobs and the median income.
The Republican Strategy on Financial Reform: Make...
Senate Republicans today debuted their new strategy for financial reform: Refuse to cooperate with Democrats on grounds that the Dems are too willing to give Wall Street what it wants.
I’m not making this up.
In a Senate floor speech Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans couldn’t support the legislation that emerged from Chris Dodd’s banking committee because it...
The Future of American Jobs
Many of my students at Berkeley who will be graduating in June are worried about the job market. I understand their worries. But they and other new college grads have less cause for concern than most American workers. Let me explain.
Since the start of the Great Recession in December 2007, the U.S. economy has shed 8.4 million jobs and failed to create another 2.7 million required by an...
Why More Immigrants Are An Answer to the Coming...
I was born in 1946, just when the boomer wave began. Bill Clinton was born that year, too. So was George W. So was Laura Bush. And Ken Starr (remember him?) And then, the next year, Hillary Clinton. And soon Newt Gingrich (known as “Newty” as a boy). And Cher. Why so many of us begin getting born in 1946? Simple. My father was in World War II. He came home. My mother was waiting. Ditto...
Break Up The Banks
A fight is brewing in Washington – or, at the least, it ought to be brewing – over whether to put limits on the size of financial entities in order that none becomes “too big to fail” in a future financial crisis.
Some background: The big banks that got federal bailouts, as well as their supporters in the Administration and on the Hill, repeatedly say much of the cost of the giant taxpayer-funded...
Greenspan, Summers, and Why the Economy Is So Out...
I’m in the “green room” at ABC News, waiting to join a roundtable panel discussion on ABC’s weekly Sunday news program, This Week.
Alan Greenspan is now being interviewed. He says he bore no responsibility for the housing bubble that catapulted the nation into a financial crisis in 2008 because no one could have known about the bubble when he chaired the Fed in the years...
The Paper Entrepreneurs Are Winning Over the...
The paper entrepreneurs are winning out over the product entrepreneurs.
Paper entrepreneurs — trained in law, finance, accountancy — manipulate complex systems of rules and numbers. They innovate by using the systems in novel ways: establishing joint ventures, consortiums, holding companies, mutual funds; finding companies to acquire, “white knights” to be acquired by,...
No Jobs Recovery
The US economy added 162,000 jobs in March. Great news until you look more closely. In March, the federal government began hiring census takers big time. These are six-month temp jobs, and they tell us nothing about underlying trends in the labor market. It’s hard to gauge precisely how many were hired — probably between 100,000 and 140,000, although some estimates put the hiring as...
The Fed in Hot Water
The Fed has finally came clean. It now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns – taking on tens of billions of dollars of the bank’s bad loans – in order to smooth Bear Stearns’ takeover by JPMorgan Chase. The secret Fed bailout came months before Congress authorized the government to spend up to $700 billion of taxpayer dollars bailing out the banks, even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed. The...
