The Peterson Institute's Adam S. Posen and Marc Hinterschweiger have a couple neat graphs making the case against financial innovation. They did not begin as skeptics. They liked the idea of financial innovation. They believed the promises "that expansion in the use of newer derivatives and the like would lead to an expansion in the country’s capital stock, and that these financial products would be useful to nonfinancial companies, not just to banks." But that didn't happen. Their first graph plots the growth of derivatives against the growth of capital stock. It basically shows a massive rise in fake money that's unconnected to any similar increase in real money.

The administration's proposals to close some corporate tax loopholes didn't get much attention last week. In part, that's because the actual issues being addressed are extremely complicated. But that doesn't mean they're not important. This sort of thing, for instance, is really galling, and insofar as we need to raise $60 billion from somewhere, stopping corporations from playing a game of international tax arbitrage is probably a good idea.

I just got off the phone with Andy Stern, head of SEIU. For the past few years, Stern has been manically building coalitions. This, it seems, was the payoff: The ultimate health care coalition. Every major industry group. And SEIU was at the table with them.

Stern acknowledged that the early release is light on specifics. But that, he argued, was a function of it being early. "We set a deadline of June 1st to try to provide real proposals that can be costed. It'll be complicated to decide what goes in the legislation. But we'll have competent people providing verifiable savings." That deadline is important. June is when the Finance Committee's first bill drops. So if these stakeholders want to see their proposals in that bill, then they need to move quickly.

There's an emergent argument that the real import of today's letter is that it serves as a club against the Congressional Budget Office. As Igor Volsky writes:

Ryan Avent -- demonstrating once again that some enterprising publication should hire him immediately -- offers the smartest commentary you'll read on the stock market today:

Today’s conventional wisdom seems to be that the recent market rally has hit an apex. My assessment is that it has either hit an apex or hasn’t, in which case it will go up or down.

This is 100 percent true. By contrast, analyses of today's stock market drop that do not say this are not 100 percent true.

To counterbalance the crankiness of the previous post, Peter Orszag's announcement that the administration is not only continuing to support is $635 billion health care fund, but actually adding pieces to it, is important news. The key issue in health care reform is, quite simply, financing. Right now, the policy exists. The money doesn't. In fact, when the Senate passed its version of the budget, the specific financing provisions in the administration's health care reserve fund were deleted entirely.