Ezra Klein

There’s been a lot of speculation over reports that the administration held the stress test results while the banks argued for more lenient treatment. But the Washington Post is the first paper I’ve seen with specifics on those conversations. Citibank, for instance, “successfully pushed to lower the amount of common equity it needs to raise […]

The administration’s argument for the stress tests’ stringency is made on page seven of the results. There’s even a helpful graph: In short, the stress tests are assuming a loan loss rate — that is to say, the percentage of loans a particular firm has written-off as non-recoverable — higher than that of the Great […]

Of late, Arlen Specter has been engaged in something of a crass-off against, well, himself. His argument for switching parties was that he’d lose the Republican primary. His argument for consistency was that he would still oppose the interests of the very voters he was now courting. But www.SpecterfortheCure.com is something of a new low. […]

I wouldn’t call the new jobs numbers good economic news, per se. They’re more like not-as-bad economic news. Recently, we’ve average 650,000 jobs losses a month. April saw a “mere” 539,000 lost jobs. And a lot of the jobs created were on the federal-side of the ledge. The private sector lost 611,000 jobs in April. […]

I should probably make up some tenuous connection to the stress tests so it seems that I have some reason for quoting this bit of Keynes’ General Theory, but really I just think it a brilliant point: [T]here is one feature in particular which deserves our attention. It might have been supposed that competition between […]

Maureen — sorry, Mo — Tkacik’s feature-length takedown of CNBC is a really elegant entry into the genre. The lede, in particular, is gorgeous and cruel. Read it. But I’m a bit less convinced by her conclusion: Isolated moments of introspection don’t really show that the network is “reevaluating what it thinks is good for […]

Here’s why: Unemployment — in their negative scenario, the stress tests assumed a year-round average unemployment rate of 8.9 percent for the 2009 and 10.3 percent for 2010. The economy is on track to have a much higher unemployment rate, as it is likely to hit 9.0 percent in April. My best guess for a […]

For more stress test commentary, check out this roundtable the New York Times held with an array of financial system experts, including Yves Smith, Simon Johnson, and William Black. The assessments range from furiously negative to grimly unconvinced. It’s, err, stressful* reading. *Sorry, sorry…

The results of the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program — sorry, the stress tests — are out. You can download the full release here. I’ve actually gotten the feeling in recent days that there’s a bit of confusion over what the stress tests actually represent. In short, the stress test was an examination of how the […]

I had an interesting e-mail exchange yesterday with a finance expert thinking of moving to DC. Come, I said. There’s work for you. And there is! Too much, in fact. One of the problems bedeviling Washington’s response to the financial crisis is that there’s very little financial expertise outside Wall Street. There’s some in the […]