Robert Kuttner

It’s a great day for the world and for the presidency of Barack Obama that Osama bin Laden was captured and killed. But people who think that this assures the president’s re-election are a little premature. A few other things have to happen first. We need to avoid a double-dip recession or a combination of […]

Late Friday afternoon, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner disclosed that he is exempting from the Dodd-Frank transparency requirements on trades of derivatives all derivatives involving foreign exchange. This creates a $4 trillion loophole that will make it easier for large banks to manipulate markets to their own advantage. The Prospect wrote that Geithner had decided to […]

I have been to this conference before. The critics of standard economics make a devastating critique of the unreality of the conventional economic model. It operates outside of historic time, makes absurd assumptions about self-correcting markets, ignores self-reinforcing behaviors, and excludes shocks that cannot be modeled, as well as cases of plain corruption. The case […]

The consensus here at the Bretton Woods conference of INET, the Soros-underwritten Institute for New Economic Thinking, is that finance can be put back in its cage—as a technical matter. But there doesn’t seem to be a political appetite to do the job right, because finance is so all-bloody powerful despite its central role in […]

I’m blogging from Bretton Woods, NH, site of the 1944 conference that reconstructed the rules for the global financial, monetary and trading system and the postwar recovery. This weekend, the world’s leading critics of the current economic mess have gathered here to discuss measures that the world’s governments should be pursuing, but lack the nerve. […]