Ezra Klein

I’d missed this the other day, but Tim Geithner apparently comforted the markets by assuring them that the “vast majority” of banks are well capitalized. But this, as Paul Krugman says, is meaningless. “There are 1,722 institutions on the Fed’s list of ‘large commercial banks’….But the big guys are where the money is. The top […]

The news is true: On May 18th, I’ll be moving about two blocks east and two blocks south to the Washington Post‘s massive building. I will have part of a desk rather than much of an office. I will not have natural light. This blog, too, will change its home, moving to the “columnists and […]

As a sort of follow-up to the title of the last post, I became interested recently in what happened to Ferguson from Clarissa Explains It All. (This blog, as you know, is not afraid to engage the big questions.) Turns out that after Clarissa, Jason Zimbler, the actor who so brilliantly portrayed Ferguson, left the […]

I don’t think CBO Director Doug Elmendorf is quite the blog enthusiast that Peter Orszag was. But week by week, his blog is rediscovering its rhythm. In particular, Elmendorf has a useful post today summarizing a lecture he gave to Greg Mankiw’s famed Intro to Econ class. It’s as clean a breakdown of the contributors […]

The suicide of Fannie Mae’s chief financial officer reminded me of an old stat I’d read about the Great Depression being a historic apex for suicides. That, it seems, is correct. The peak was in 1933, with 17.4 out of every 100,000 Americans killing themselves. So can we expect to see a sharp rise in […]

If you were Ben Nelson, wouldn’t you be loudly signaling that you’re “fully prepared” to vote against health reform? A historic transformation of a $2 trillion industry and you are the hinge vote that might decide passage. A simple public servant like, say, Carl Levin, just votes for the package because it’s a good thing […]

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities talks some sense on Social Security’s finances. The short version is that the recession has worsened the program’s fiscal outlook — much like it’s worsened the fiscal outlook for every program. The long version is that “Social Security continues to run significant surpluses, even though the recession has […]

By Dylan Matthews I hesitate to self-promote too shamelessly on Ezra’s turf, but I have a new piece up at Campus Progress building on a guest-post I wrote here a few months ago. Basically, I want to get rid of the US Senate, and asked a number of constitutional law experts how one would go […]

By Dylan Matthews Nordic socialism is terrifying: You know, when segments like this are airing on programs with viewership as high as The Daily Show‘s, Harold Meyerson’s “Glenn Beck will bring socialism to America” theory starts going from funny to plausible. And for good measure, here’s Robyn talking about how socialism has helped make Swedish […]