It is not everyday we get to agree with Paul Krugman, so it is our pleasure to link to his comments last week about President Barack Obama’s burgeoning plans to request hundreds of billions of dollars of more borrowed money to further socialize our nation’s banks: As the Obama administration apparently prepares to launch Hankie Pankie II — buying troubled assets from banks at prices higher than they will fetch on the open market — it occurred to me that an updated version of an old Communist-era joke may be …
Professor of European Political Economy at the London School of Economics, Willem Buiter, writes at the Financial Times: I used to be optimistic about the capacity of our political leaders and central bankers to avoid the policy mistakes that could turn the current global recession into a deep and lasting global depression. Now I’m not so sure. I used to believe that the unavoidable protectionist and mercantilist rhetoric would not be matched by protectionist and mercantilist deeds. Protectionism was one of the factors that turned a US financial crisis into …
This Friday the New York Times reported: Even as Congress looks for ways to expand President Obama’s $819 billion stimulus package, the rest of the world is wondering how Washington will pay for it all. … “The U.S. needs to show some proof they have a plan to get out of the fiscal problem,” said Ernesto Zedillo, the former Mexican president who helped steer his country through a financial crisis in 1994. “We, as developing countries, need to know we won’t be crowded out of the capital markets, which is …
During the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, President Bill Clinton mastered the art of burying bad news: release everything late on Friday afternoon and hope everyone in Washington forgets about it by Monday. Only one week into his presidency it is clear that President Barack Obama is equally adept at this skill. Late Friday night Obama Health and Human Services secretary nominee Tom Daschle told reporters that he paid over $140,000 in back taxes and interest to the IRS on January 2, of this year. The $128,00 in unreported …
