Ezra Klein

It’s sort of received wisdom that the Securities and Exchange Commission is irredeemably captured by the financial industry and totally incapable of conducting its daily affairs. But what you didn’t know was how comically incompetent it was. Moe Tkacik — with an assist from a GAO report — explains.

Sorry for the slow blogging today. Meetings are the enemy of the blog. But I did want to say a word on Malcolm Gladwell, who’s coming in for a lot of semi-deserved flack for his article on underdogs. In the piece, Gladwell offers up a puff job on Silicon Valley parent who coached a team […]

Felix Salmon writes: When the government announced its stress tests on February 23, Bank of America stock closed at $3.91 a share. At that level, if the government converted $34 billion of preferred stock into common equity, it would have received 8.7 billion shares in Bank of America. There are 6.4 billion shares outstanding right […]

Peter Orszag lists off a couple of the programs the administration is eliminating. Included among them is this winner of an expenditure: Educational attaché, Paris, France ($632,000). The Department of Education can use e-mail, video conferencing, and modest travel to replace a full-time representative to UNESCO in Paris, France. Some enterprising reporter should figure out […]

“Not only is it going to be intrinsically difficult to ever find a viable revenue model for paying a reporter to cover the zoning board if people don’t want to read about the zoning board,” writes Matt Yglesias, “[but] I’m not actually sure how much social value is created by unread articles about zoning boards. […]

The Senate Finance Committee is holding hearings on cap and trade today. And Baucus starts it off with a nice point. “Action would not be without cost,” he admits. “But the costs of inaction would be far greater.” That’s really the key insight. No one advocates a cap and trade program or a carbon tax […]

That’s how Obama’s aides are signing their e-mails today. And why not? It’s a big day! The full budget! “Financial information on individual programs and appropriation accounts”! “The proposed text of appropriations language”! Extremely trivial cuts that the administration is nevertheless selling as a painful effort in belt-tightening. Join the fun!

When you’re arguing policy, you have to decide whether you’re arguing in the perfect world or the real world, and then you have to hold that constant. There’s no use arguing a textbook policy against a piece of legislation, or vice-versa. You see this pretty clearly in debates between supporters of cap-and-trade and supporters of […]

Tim Fernholz rounds up some evidence that Geithner’s political acumen is, err, less than Emmanuel-esque, and quotes Politico‘s speculation that Tim Geithner is simply “too big to fail.” That may be true. On the other hand, you could also say that Geithner is particularly well-placed to fail: He has been simultaneously presented as being somewhat […]

I’ve not seen it getting much play in the blogosphere, but the Center for Public Integrity unveiled a hefty new web site tracking the subprime efforts, lending standards, and lobbying dollars of the major banks. The point of the report is simple: They meant to do this. Not “this” insofar as it means getting their […]