Prospect blogger and real live economist Dean Baker has a new weekly column rounding up the latest news about the economy. Look for it every Thursday. Here's a sample of the inaugural installment:
The prospect of investment banks moving overseas in response to more stringent regulation has been raised repeatedly by opponents of such regulation. This raises an obvious question: Why should we care?We buy shoes, toys, cars, and steel from abroad; why should anyone be bothered by the prospect that we would be getting our investment banking services from other countries?There could even be an important fringe benefit from getting our investment banking services from England: We wouldn't have investment bankers intervening in our politics. I'm thinking of course of Peter Peterson, a top executive at the Blackstone Group, who has gotten incredibly wealthy from the income from his banking business and the fund managers' tax subsidy. Mr. Peterson has spent much of the last two decades trying to cut funding for Social Security and Medicare. He founded the Concord Coalition in 1992 to advance this end. This group has put out hundreds of papers and held numerous conferences, the vast majority of which covered the supposed need to cut Social Security and Medicare. More recently Mr. Peterson announced the creation of a new foundation dedicated to restoring fiscal soundness, which to his mind means cutting Social Security and Medicare. If we had better regulations of investment banks, perhaps Mr. Peterson would be living in England and trying to dismantle its Social Security system.
--The Editors
