Jon Cohn is enthused. Paul Krugman is excited. Maybe I’m just churlish. Maybe I’m getting cranky as I age. But I can’t shake my skepticism about today’s big health care announcement. First, the announcement: At about 12:30 today, representatives from the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, Advamed, […]
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein is a former Prospect writer and current editor-in-chief at Vox. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Guardian, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, Slate, and The Columbia Journalism Review. He’s been a commentator on MSNBC, CNN, NPR, and more.
Posted inArticle
SNL DOES THE STRESS TESTS.
Minutes two through five of this skit sort of read like an old Celebrity Jeopardy script that they dusted off and applied to Tim Geithner and Citibank. But minute one is very good.
Posted inArticle
FROM THE ED SCHULTZ SHOW.
Lawrence O’Donnell was co-hosting, and O’Donnell wanted to talk about the problems with using budget reconciliation. And so we did. I think he’s probably right about the problems of using reconciliation for health care policy, but he’s underplaying its importance as a threat. It makes a bipartisan bill more, not less, likely. I make this […]
Posted inArticle
THE FEDERAL RESERVE AND THE IMF AGREE.
I’d been hearing that the Federal Reserve’s estimates for how much capital the banking system would need were quite a bit lower than the IMF’s. More evidence that the stress tests are optimistic and that Geithner is a Wall Street stooge! But James Surowiecki digs deeper into the numbers and finds that they’re actually quite […]
Posted inArticle
WHAT SORT OF BANKERS DOES WASHINGTON NEED?
In response to yesterday’s post suggesting that Washington do more to attract out-of-work finance types, a smart financy type who recently came to Washington e-mails: I totally agree with you that the progressive community needs to be pushing ahead much more aggressively on reg reform. One thing you didn’t mention is that the fin. services […]
Posted inArticle
CAN TWITTER SATISFY OUR DEEPEST NEEDS?
Maybe some of them. I rather like Ruth Reichl’s take on Twitter: Twitter is a sort of public diary; figurative scraps of paper. Are you enjoying it? Enormously. As I wrote in my first book, privacy is overrated. My mother’s scraps of paper were shouts into the void, and I think she would have been […]
Posted inArticle
FRANK LUNTZ TELLS REPUBLICANS TO HIT “REPEAT.”
A bunch of readers have written in to ask why I haven’t commented on pollster Frank Luntz’s “leaked” memo advising Republicans on their efforts to oppose health reform. The basic answer is I don’t think it’s an important document. I could have written the whole thing myself just by reversing-engineering one of Rudy Giuliani’s speeches. […]
Posted inArticle
THE NEW YORK FED THINKS THE BANKS REPRESENT THE PEOPLE.
Eliot Spitzer expounds on one of my favorite topics: The astonishing composition of the New York Federal Reserve: who selected Geithner back in 2003? Well, the Fed board created a select committee to pick the CEO. This committee included none other than Hank Greenberg, then the chairman of AIG; John Whitehead, a former chairman of […]
Posted inArticle
STEALTH SUBSIDIES CONTINUE.
Tim Geithner’s announcement that banks who wanted to repay their money early would have to also leave the FDIC’s low-interest lending program received a pretty favorable response the other day. Banks shouldn’t be able to leave only those government programs that impose regulatory constraints. No banks with benefits! But as Binyamin Appelbaum and Neil Irwin […]
Posted inArticle
YOU CAN’T FIGHT CITY HALL.
I never understand the fuss over Supreme Court nominations. The president holds all the power. That’s even more true if his party controls the Senate. So when conservative groups “concede that they have little chance of derailing Obama’s choice, barring a scandal,” what does it mean? If they derail Obama’s choice, he’ll just make another […]