Andrew Ross Sorkin did a good job of making things up to argue that we shouldn't have a policy against "too big to fail banks." Sorkin argued the need for big banks by telling readers that:

"If Pfizer, for example, needs to raise $20 billion for a takeover bid, or Verizon needs to raise billions to lay fiber optic cable for its FiOS service, they cannot efficiently go to 20 different community banks looking for the money."

The NYT reports that Johnson & Johnson paid kickbacks to a pharmacy company to get it to distribute its drugs for unauthorized uses to nursing home residents. This article would have benefited from some economic analysis.

This is the textbook response that would be predicted from government interference in a market through the granting of patent monopolies. The monopoly allows the patent holder to charge prices that are far above he cost of production. This gives them an enormous incentive to make side payments or bribes to increase their sales.

Michael Grunwald at Time Magazine does some first class apologetics for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in his latest column. He repeats the line that we should be thankful to Geithner and company that we didn't have another Great Depression.

While we all should be happy that we didn't get another Great Depression, the only reason why anyone is talking about a Great Depression is because of the incredible economic mismanagement of Greenspan/Bernanke/Geithner. Remarkably, they either could not see or did not care about the growth of an $8 trillion housing bubble. It was totally predictable that the collapse of this bubble would throw the economy into a severe downturn.

Ten percent unemployment and millions of people losing their home, that's waaaaay more funny than anything on Jay Leno or Conan O'Brien. That is how they are playing it on Morning Edition.

NPR told listeners that there are so many different theories. Yeah, I guess there are many different explanations for how human life took its current form, but evolution is the only one that serious people believe. The causes of the financial crisis are not complicated, even if NPR wants its listeners to believe they are.

In September of 2008 Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke ran to Congress telling them that if they did not immediately approve $700 billion for the TARP that the economy would completely collapse. According to the NYT, he told Congress yesterday that: "stripping the Fed of its powers would leave the financial system more vulnerable to collapse."

That's the nightmare scenario raised by the big banks in response to President Obama's proposal to impose a tax on the largest banks equal to 9.0 billion a year. The banks argued that this would be really bad news for the economy since they would pass on the fee to their customers. It would have been helpful to point out to readers the modest impact that this possibility would actually have on the economy.

Yes, I have another book. In False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy, I try to correct all the ignorant experts (redundant?) who could not see the housing bubble before it burst and still cannot understand it even after the fact. It was amazing to me that so many economists, all of whom presumably learned arithmetic somewhere in their training, could not recognize an $8 trillion housing bubble as it was growing.