Tim Fernholz

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a sleazebag of epic proportions, a corrupt leader whose name has become synonymous with amorality and thuggish governance. His career produced some good journalism, notably this GQ profile which contains perhaps the best kicker of the year. But, via Michael Scherer, this anecdote is another level of horrifying. At […]

Senate Republicans are holding up all the chamber’s business to push their top priority of giving the wealthy an unpaid-for tax cut. Meanwhile, the Build America Bonds program, which I have defended before, is set to expire at the end of the year. The bonds are unlike those normally issued by states and cities because […]

We’ve talked before about critiques of the loan underwriting at the heart of the financial crisis; basically, the judgment needed to do good borrower evaluation dissappears when you take the human element out of underwriting, a problem compounded by the monetary incentives to produce and sell as many mortgage-backed securities as possible, regardless of the […]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its latest jobs report: Unemployment has notched up to 9.8 percent after the private sector gained some 37,000 jobs, a disappointing total considering we need to see monthly gains in the hundreds of thousands to start digging the country out of its unemployment hole any time soon. The […]

According to Pat Garofalo’s research, it can! Ireland has long been a favored economic example for conservatives, who loved its ridiculously low tax rates — so low that the country’s role as a corporate tax shelter actually distorted measures of its economic growth. Now that Ireland has been caught up in the financial crisis, conservatives […]

I wasn’t impressed with the EU’s rescue of Ireland — it simply doesn’t share enough of the costs with the private-sector lenders, putting all the (unsustainable) financial pressure on Irish taxpayers. Matt Yglesias has a good post on the politics behind this. Basically, Germany and France set the tone for the EU’s monetary policy and […]

Ezra Klein usefully distills a long-observed Obama phenomenon: “concessions the White House has unilaterally made to Republicans” and what little has come from them. What’s always boggled me is that no one in the White House has an even vaguely compelling explanation for this decision-making process — it’s obviously not what partisanship looks like, and […]

I’m still digesting the fiscal commission’s final draft [PDF], which was released this morning, and won’t have extensive analysis until later. In the meantime, here’s a little scoop for you: I obtained this list of changes [PDF] which catalogs how the budget balancing plan changed since the commission’s chairmen released a working paper a month […]

TARP, originally some $700 billion, will cost the American taxpayer approximately $25 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (That last bit of money could be recouped with a handy bank tax, but, you know, Congress.) TARP, for all of its moral and mechanical problems, has turned out to be a relatively cheap way to […]

… and I can tell you that before reading the final report, officially released at 9:30 this morning. Why? The members of the commission released their plan today but are going to vote on its recommendations Friday — meaning that the whole report is now one big trial balloon. Remember that the point of the […]