Tim Fernholz

Ben Stein, the former Nixon official and television personality who now spends his time pretending to be an economist (he’s not) writes about unemployment at the American Spectator: I have lived through many recessions. … Until now, I never had a friend who was truly in financial extremis from a recession. When recessions happened, they […]

Whether or not Republicans manage to win a majority in the House in this fall’s elections, its important to understand what they’ll win if they choose to run without an agenda: no real mandate for their own policies. Republicans, in the main, are right that their best strategy is running as not-Democrats because GOP policies […]

Today’s Ross Douthat offering has already prompted a thoughtful response from Adam, but I wanted to note the conservative NYT writer’s inability to assess competing arguments. First, from his opening statement: While the assembled Ivy Leaguers accused [Pat Buchanan] of homophobia and racism and anti-Semitism, he accused Harvard — and by extension, the entire American […]

Here’s an interesting new profile of Paul Volcker and his efforts to strengthen the financial-reform bill that’s worth reading if you want to understand more of the behind-the-scenes work on the bill. One worthwhile section concerns a distinction that has been left out during the debate over Volcker’s key contribution, which is that his eponymous […]

On Friday, we saw a brewing contretemps between Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and TARP watchdog Elizabeth Warren. Warren, the Harvard Law professor who is a central advocate of the financial-reform bill’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is seen as a likely nominee to lead the new agency. Reports arose that Geithner opposes Warren’s nomination, leading to […]

Yesterday, we explored how conservatives view deficits, and I noted that National Review‘s Kevin Williamson, who wrote a piece in May criticizing the Republican establishment’s nonsensical approach to tax cuts, hadn’t commented on recent comments from prominent Republicans arguing that tax cuts raise revenue. Now he has weighed in, and while he, like me, criticizes […]

After a single anonymous source told the Huffington Post that Tim Geithner is trying to block Elizabeth Warren’s potential nomination to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, critics are teeing off on the Treasury Department. While there is some tension between the two arising from Warren’s job overseeing the TARP program, this story is being […]

The international negotiations to hammer out broad, global rules for bank behavior are progressing, with countries scrapping over how to protect their pet styles of banking. You may have heard that Europeans prefer their large, “universal” banks to the kind of segmented system preferred by American reformers, but the debates, specifically around capital requirements, are […]

Today’s passage of financial reform in the Senate by a vote of 60-39, and the news that the president will sign the bill by the end of the day, caps a remarkable run; In the past two years, the sheer magnitude of legislation that the president and his congressional allies have passed marks one of […]

A friend referred me to an old post at the reliably interesting Strange Maps: The creator of this map has had the interesting idea to break down that gigantic US GDP into the GDPs of individual states, and compare those to other countries’ GDP. What follows, is this slightly misleading map – misleading, because the […]