Ezra Klein

Its a bit of a dead if you do, dead if you don’t, problem. James Kwak explains: From a regulatory perspective, the goal is to determine which banks will fail a worst-case scenario and force them to take preventive action. But at the same time, the Treasury Department is trying to restore confidence in the […]

Thoma Hoenig, President of the Kansas City Federal Reserve, is a pretty credentialed guy. He’s been with the Federal Reserve since 1973, specializing in banking supervision. He knows, presumably, both how banks work and also how effective regulators can be when they choose to interfere with their workings. So it seems meaningful that he’s giving […]

Representative Tom Price has an op-ed in Politico today where he argues: Because of Washington’s inability to deliver high-quality care, the American people remain wholly opposed to turning control of medical decisions over to the government. To overcome this, Democrats in Congress have begun promoting an innocent-sounding “public option.” They claim the public option would […]

Tax quibbles aside, Russell Shorto’s explanation of how he stopped worrying and learned to love the European welfare state is nicely done. The answer is pretty simple: He started to like the welfare state when he began to receive its services. This, incidentally, is the sort of thing that conservatives worry about quite publicly in […]

Writer goes to the Netherlands. Writer notices 52 percent tax rate. Writer freaks. Writer finds out that the situation is rather more complicated than all that: [W]hile the top income-tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, the numbers are a bit misleading. “People coming from the U.S. to the Netherlands focus on that […]

Felix Salmon wonders “who would be so foolish as to leak these things?” But this seems an inevitable result of Treasury’s decision to delay the results so banks can argue “for a more lenient approach.” (The fact that we know this is a pretty staggering leak in and of itself.) As Brad DeLong argues, that’s […]

Scott Sumner makes a (mostly) interesting point here. Bill Gates essentially taxed middle class consumers all over the developed world, and is giving almost all of the money to the disadvantaged in poor countries. That’s something governments don’t do, and yet for his “monopoly profits” he is despised by many on the left. Putting aside […]

James Surowiecki does a nice job making a point I’ve been hearing occasionally. Most bubbles leave the country with something of worth. The tech bubble, say, gave the country the tech sector. The initial enthusiasm leaves the country with a bit of a hangover, but you’ve still got a pocket of phone numbers from the […]

Barry Eichengreen has a long piece in the latest National Interest arguing that economics didn’t miss the financial crisis so much as the relevant folks engaged in “a partial and blinkered reading of [the] literature” in order to ignore results that would cut against them making more money. As the old saying goes, it is […]

I’m a little bit loathe to enter this subject because I’m finishing up an article on a related topic. But suffice to say that even though the data on whether being healthier would make health care cheaper is pretty mixed, we can still be pretty sure it’s a good thing. Paul Campos offers the standard […]