Adam Serwer asks: TAPPED Archive : I think Paul Campos’ response to the shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum yesterday is worth pondering…. Michelle Malkin wrote an entire book defending the internment on the basis of race in the case of Japanese internment during World War II. Cliff May argued that torture is justified against Muslims because they’re Muslim
By Edward Hugh: Barcelona Earlier this week Brad Setser was opining on his blog : “Like everyone else, I am curious to see what China’s May trade data tells us. If China truly is going to lead the global recovery, China needs to import more – and not just import more commodities for its (growing) strategic stockpiles.” Well Brad need restrain his curiosity no longer, since just this very morning we have learnt that: China’s exports fell by a record in May as the global recession cut demand for goods produced by the world’s third-largest economy
Neil Buchanan: The 2009 Social Security Trustees’ Report: Good News Behind the Headlines Ali Frick: Fox News’ Shep Smith: DHS Report Was A ‘Warning To Us All,’ But ‘The Right Went Absolutely Bonkers’ Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Commenters on Sotomayor, Brooks, and Sullivan Robert Waldmann’s Theory on Income Distribution and Infant Mortality Diane Lim Rogers: What’s Not So Great About Obama’s Proposal to Pay As He Goes David Leonhardt: How the U.S. Surplus Became a Deficit Tyler Cowen: My talk on economics for university administrators Posner, Part II: What Now
While the London G20 Summit represented a step towards a more inclusive global governance system, further institutional reforms are badly needed to ensure the interests of low-income countries are adequately represented, according to national leaders and other participants gathered at this year’s World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town. In particular, they urged the major industrialized countries to accept long-stalled changes in the governing structures of the IMF and the World Bank. “A critical lesson from the current crisis is the need for a transformed global financial system,” Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa, said in his opening address
Megan: Jezebel – Op-Ed Writer: Pro-Choicers Have George Tiller’s Blood On Their Hands – Ross douthat late term abortion : I’m starting to suspect that the New York Times is giving increasingly ill-considered and poorly written conservatives column space in an effort to undermine the idea that Republican ideology has any intellectual validity. Otherwise, I don’t really see what the papers’ editors are thinking, between hiring neocon idiot Bill Kristol and then replacing him with slut-shaming, supposedly new-idea-having former Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat
From SCOTUS Blog: Court clears Chrysler sale Ending four days of intense, round-the-clock and high-stakes legal maneuvering in the Supreme Court, the Justices on Tuesday evening removed a legal obstacle to sale of the troubled auto industry giant, Chrysler. Insisting that it was denying a postponement “in this case alone,” the two-page order said the challengers had not met their burden of showing that a delay was justified. The order allows a closing of the deal as of next Monday, because it lifts a temporary stay that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had issued on Monday, apparently to give the Court time to ponder the issue
Title: Modern Theories of Political Economy Prerequisites: Completion of PE 100 and IAS 45 are required before students can register for the course. Sequence: Students intending to become Political Economy majors will ideally complete PE 101 by the end of their sophomore year. Objectives: PE 101 examines modern approaches to the interaction between economics and politics–what in an earlier age would have been called “moral philosophy.” Building on the knowledge of world history covered in IAS 45 and the thinkers of the classical political economy tradition covered in PE 100, it focuses on the usefulness of alternative theories of political economy, both the classical theories covered in PE 100 and the modern theories of the 20th and 21st centuries in the their historical context
By Edward Hugh: Barcelona Well, I am busying myself this morning scratching around looking for green shoots in Turkey . But even as I was digging for these I couldn’t help notice this coming in over the radar from Germany, courtesy of Bloomberg : German exports fell more than economists forecast in April as the global crisis restrained demand, keeping Europe’s largest economy mired in a recession. Sales abroad, adjusted for working days and seasonal changes, fell 4.8 percent from March, when they rose a revised 0.3 percent, the Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden said today.
Icelandic Prime Minister Geir Haarde’s resignation on January 23rd of this year marked the first political casualty of the current financial crisis. While the Icelandic situation has received scant attention relative to other calamities reverberating through the world’s financial markets, the source of Iceland’s woes can be found in many of the same locales. FULL ARTICLE
From MarketWatch: Ten large banks can return $68 billion in TARP Repay TARP: NTRS, BBT, MS, STT, JPM, USB, AXP, COF, GS, BNY It is a little confusing because Northern Trust (NTRS) wasn’t one of the 19 stress test banks. Name TARP Amount Repay Bank of America $52.5 billion No way! Citigroup $50 billion No way! JPMorgan Chase $25 billion XXX Wells Fargo $25 billion – GMAC $12.5 billion No way! Goldman Sachs $10 billion XXX Morgan Stanley $10 billion XXX PNC Financial Services $7.6 billion – U.S. Bancorp $6.6 billion XXX SunTrust $4.9 billion – Capital One Financial Corp.
From CNBC: Repeat Bank Stress Tests ‘Right Now’: TARP Panel Chair The Congressionally-appointed panel overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) recommends running again the stress tests on US banks, as economic conditions have worsened, its chair, Harvard University professor Elizabeth Warren, told CNBC Tuesday. “We actually make recommendations to do it all over again right now,” Warren told “Squawk Box.” “We’ve already blown past the worst-case scenario on unemployment,” she added. …
From the Fed : The 10 banking organizations required by the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program to bolster their capital buffers have all submitted capital plans that, if implemented, would provide sufficient capital to meet the required buffer under the assessment’s more-adverse scenario. As supervisors, we will be working with the institutions to ensure their plans are implemented quickly and effectively. Supervisors also continue to work with all regulated financial institutions to review the quality of their corporate-governance, risk-management and capital-planning processes
Mises’s memoirs are a unique source of inside information about the economics and politics of the first republic of Austria. They portray his professional life from about 1906 (the year he graduated with a doctorate in law from the University of Vienna) to 1940, stressing his activities in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, in World War I, in government, and in academia. He not only knew the intellectuals of his day; he had almost daily interaction with the political leaders of his country, with the higher echelons of the civil service, and with the executives of Austrian firms and business corporations
Riccardo Rebonato of the Royal Bank of Scotland and author of Plight of the Fortune Tellers talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the challenges of measuring risk and making decisions and creating regulation in the face of risk and uncertainty. Rebonato’s book, written before the crisis, argues that risk managers often overestimate the reliability of the measures they use to assess risk
My father defends the Ames Monument: UGLY!??! I’ll have you know that the Ames Monument contains within itself most of 19th Century American history — the railroad! crony capitalists! Manifest Destiny! New England duty! government extortion! congressional cynicism and betrayal! the industrial revolution! Victorian taste (it was designed by noted architect H.H. Richardson)! [Not to mention bas-reliefs by St. Gaudens]; irony (the UP moved the tracks and it now sits by itself in the middle of the lone prairie).
One of the things the news bureaus of the Washington Post must do before they can ever again become a great paper is to develop an enthusiastic ethos of publicly calling bulls— on the editorial page operations of the odious Fred Hiatt whenever possible. Ezra Klein takes a first step at Hiatt and company: Ezra Klein: Department of Corrections: Michael Gerson vs. the Health Industry : Michael Gerson’s column contains a pretty significant factual error.
Eugene Voiokh seriously dislikes the arguments of National Review “legal correspondent” Ed Whalen: The Volokh Conspiracy – Supreme Court Justices and “Policy Implications” : [T]alk [like Ed Whalen's] about how judges shouldn’t “make policy” has been commonplace now, especially on the Right…. [C]riticisms of… decisionmaking based on what seems to the judge to be likelier to produce good results are often correct….
By Edward Hugh: Barcelona The Latvian economy is certaily stuck in a hard and not especially pleasent place at the moment, and really one chart tells it all, since as we see above the local interbank overnight interest rates have been storming upwards and through the roof over the last two weeks. As a result of this unfortunate state of affairs the country has attained a higher profile in the international news media than most Latvians would ever have dreamt possible, or even, probably, considered desirable
Vladimir Putin forces an aluminum plant owner into humiliating public submission: When you think about the cram down the Obama people forced on the Chrysler bondholders in violation of U.S. bankruptcy law, or you recall the humiliation of the automakers driving economy cars cross country to testify before Congress, or if you recently watched a quavering and submissive Vikram Pandit — CEO of U.S. government owned Citi — on CNBC talking about the justified “retribution” of President Obama and his public supporters against freedom of contract on Wall Street, you have to think we really are not that far from a behind-closed doors version of the world which Putin now commands in Russia
The “two teeth for a tooth” view of punishment is espoused by Murray Rothbard (see ” Punishment and Proportionality ,” in Ethics of Liberty ) and Walter Block (see Toward a Libertarian Theory of Guilt and Punishment for the Crime of Statism and Radical Libertarianism: Applying Libertarian Principles to Dealing with the Unjust Government, Parts I & II ). Walter received a email recently from a Ukrainian software developer, Vladislav Gluhovsky , with a critique of this idea and some related thoughts. Mr.
The Wall Street Journal picks up my draft call for more fiscal expansion: Making the Case for Another Fiscal Stimulus : Although President Obama’s $787 billion fiscal stimulus is still working its way through the pipeiline, Berkeley economist — and former Clinton Treasury official — Brad Delong makes the case for another round. In a draft of a letter he says he may send Obama next week, he said: At the end of 2008, when your incoming administration was preparing your recession-fighting strategy, your forecasts were that the recession would bottom out in August of 2009, with a peak unemployment rate of 7.9%. The unemployment rate in May was already 9.4%.
From the WaPo: Bank Repayments May Exceed Estimate The Obama administration is set to announce next week that a larger-than-expected number of big financial firms can repay their bailout funds … The size of the repayments may double the initial estimate of $25 billion by the Treasury Department, the sources said. That would mean that many, perhaps nearly all, of the nine firms that regulators found to have sufficient reserves in a recent “stress test” would be allowed to return federal aid
Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps? National Review: Brian Buetler: National Review’s Wise Latina Caricature Inexplicably Asian : As part of a cover package called “The Wise Latina,” the folks over at the conservative National Review–apparently flummoxed by the very idea of a “wise Latina”–have caricaturized the Puerto Rican-descended Sonia Sotomayor as an Asian Buddhist. Good times
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? At least this made me laugh and brightened my day: National Review: Brian Buetler snarks: National Review's Wise Latina Caricature Inexplicably Asian : [T]he folks over at the conservative National Review–apparently flummoxed by the very idea of a “wise Latina”–have caricaturized the Puerto Rican-descended Sonia Sotomayor as an Asian Buddhist
“That Left Turn in ABQ” on BHO’s Cairo speech: The Speech : I was struck by the way Obama moved the Overton Window in this speech with regard to official US rhetoric in support of the Palestinians (has any US President ever described their plight as “intolerable” in a major speech, prior to today?) while… speaking very directly and forcefully against Holocaust denialism, using extreme positions on both sides against each other…. This is a theme which frequently arises in Obama’s speeches
