Ezra Klein

By Dylan Matthews First off, thanks to Ezra for having me over again. It’s always a treat hanging out with you guys. So former ambassador to Venezuela/Assistant Secretary of State/chief Bush administration filibuster Otto Reich isn’t pleased about Obama’s Latin America policy. And when writers at The Corner find a foreign policy approach they disagree […]

Apologies for the light posting today. I’m en route to Missoula, Montana, where I’m going to be giving a talk at The Badlander tomorrow night at 5pm. In the meantime, Dylan Matthews will be taking holding down the blog. He’s smart. You like him. You know how this works.I’ll be back on Thursday. Right now, […]

A lot of labor-types will be unhappy that Andy Stern told the Washington Post editorial board that card check might not pass and unions might need to find an acceptable compromise. But I find it heartening. Card check almost certainly won’t pass this Congress. You can’t do it through reconciliation, Specter was the likeliest Republican […]

The New York Times reported yesterday that the government is likely to begin converting the government’s existing loans to the nation’s 19 biggest banks into common stock. Paul Krugman is not a fan of this strategy, and he makes that clear by analogizing it to yo’ momma (you think I’m kidding. I don’t kid.). Felix […]

According to The Wall Street Journal, Timothy Geithner has indicated that the health of individual banks won’t be the sole criterion for whether financial firms will be allowed to repay bailout funds. But as Felix Salmon writes, it’s not clear that he has the authority to impose new conditions on TARP participants. The relevant line […]

James Webb, it seems, will not be supporting the Employee Free Choice Act, and won’t even say if he’d support efforts to break a filibuster and let it get to the floor for a vote. That’s a significant blow to EFCA, and something of a surprise given Webb’s carefully cultivated image as an economic populist.

Over at the Congressional Budget Office, they’ve announced the composition of this year’s Health Advisory Panel. “We host periodic meetings of the advisers at our office and solicit their views between meetings via e-mail exchanges and conference calls. Through these interactions, we benefit from the advisers’ understanding of cutting-edge research and the latest developments in […]

Over at the OMB’s Blog, Peter Orszag gives a warm welcome to Cass Sunstein, who’s nomination as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is now official. Over the course of his career, Sunstein has done a lot of work, some of it mildly controversial, in the area of cost-benefit analysis. That’s a […]

Tangentially-related to the question of whether Wall Street types deserve their compensation packages is the yearly phenomenon in which actively managed mutual funds underperform the market. Between 2004 and 2008, 66.21% of domestic funds did worse than the S&P Composite 1500. In 2008, 64.23% underperformed. In other words, if you had a fund manager and […]

I’m less enthused than Jon Cohn by Carrie Budoff Brown’s Politico story suggesting Republicans are in disarray on health reform. Brown’s argument is that Republicans are in desperate need of a plan. I agree with that. But Budoff thinks they need a Republican plan. I think that’s backwards. What they need is a Democratic plan. […]