Ezra Klein

Barry Eichengreen has a long piece in the latest National Interest arguing that economics didn’t miss the financial crisis so much as the relevant folks engaged in “a partial and blinkered reading of [the] literature” in order to ignore results that would cut against them making more money. As the old saying goes, it is […]

I’m a little bit loathe to enter this subject because I’m finishing up an article on a related topic. But suffice to say that even though the data on whether being healthier would make health care cheaper is pretty mixed, we can still be pretty sure it’s a good thing. Paul Campos offers the standard […]

Not to fill the blog with Arlen Specter related content this morning, but this bit from Meet the Press deserves to be quoted. MR. GREGORY: Do you support taxing the value of, the value of employer-provided health care for workers?SEN. SPECTER: No, I’d be very reluctant to do that. Health care provided by employers, which […]

“I did not say I would be a loyal Democrat,” insisted Arlen Specter on Meet the Press. “I did not say that.” And it’s true, he didn’t say that. But people about to compete in a Democratic primary in a blue state tend not to spend a lot of time trumpeting what loyal Democrats they […]

It’s a little dizzying to read that The New York Times is on the verge of shutting down the Boston Globe. And here I thought bloggers were the scoundrels killing the newspapers. Turns out it’s…other newspapers. And that’s true not just in the sense that the Chicago Tribune is wrecking the Los Angeles Times, which […]

The administration is expected to release the results of the stress tests this week. According to David Leonhardt, no banks will be judged insolvent. But some will be judged insufficiently capitalized. In other words, sick, but not dead. And the Obama administration means to heal them without returning to Congress. One of the ways they’ll […]

I understand why people might be angry over Ben Nelson’s decision to come out against a public insurance option in health care reform. But not why they’d be surprised. Nelson, after all, voted to cut the stimulus, voted against the budget, is fighting to retain the breaks to student loan middlemen, is loudly broadcasting his […]

“From my misspent years in DC,” writes James Fallows, “I believe I can identify every person in this photo.” He’s better than me, then. From left to right, I see Austen Goolsbee, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, and Jared Bernstein. Beyond that, I’m stumped.

Noam Scheiber has an interesting story in this week’s New Republic tracking the effort by the banks to screw over the professional investors. The very short summary is that the banks wanted a “safe harbor provision” that would give them legal immunity from investor lawsuits if they modified mortgages. This has, in turn, generated a […]