Congress will soon consider whether Ben Bernanke merits another term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. It is fair to say that no single individual played a larger role in responding to the recent financial crisis. The Fed has directly lent more than $2 trillion to financial and non-financial institutions...

The big talk in Washington these days is "helping homeowners." Unfortunately, what passes for help to homeowners in the capitol might look more like handing out money to banks anywhere else.

The basic story is fairly simple. Tens of millions of US homeowners are now underwater: they owe more on...

The country is being bombarded with stories claiming that record budget deficits threaten our children's future and jeopardize the credibility of the dollar. These stories are a serious problem -- they have hugely confused the public about the nature of the country's economic crisis. And both parties share the blame.

As most of us are preparing for the holidays a small clique in the Senate, with their collaborators in the Washington punditry, are planning for a dramatic hostage-taking event. Their target of opportunity is a bill to increase the nation's debt limit. The hostage-takers propose to obstruct the bill's passage...

As part of the Roosevelt Institute's 10-part series on the Jobs Crisis, running on the New Deal 2.0 blog from Nov. 12-25, I was asked to reflect on what can be done to get Americans working again. Here's my take.

The unemployment rate is 10.2 percent and virtually certain...

There is a major national ad campaign, funded by the oil industry and other usual suspects, to convince the public that measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and slow global warming will result in massive job loss. This ad campaign warns of slower growth and the loss of hundreds...

Those who like banks that are too big to fail will love the latest financial reform proposals circulating in the US Congress. The bill put forward by Barney Frank, the chairman of the House finance committee, does little to change the current structure of the financial system.

The "too-big-to-fail" banks...

A year after President Obama was elected, progressives can say that we got pretty much what we had a right to expect. President Obama ran as a centrist. In the campaign, he repeatedly talked about how he wanted to govern in a bi-partisan manner, with the Republicans as genuine partners....

Like termites, the American Bankers Association (ABA) does most of its damage in the dark. But the ABA is getting a brief period in the limelight this week as a result of the Showdown in Chicago.

The Showdown is a series of protests organized by a number of community...

Kenneth Feinberg, President Obama's compensation czar for bailed out banks, appears to have taken some genuine steps to rein in excessive executive compensation at the basket case banks that received the most TARP money. He cut cash salaries by 90 percent in some cases and reduced overall compensation for the...

Most of the economists and pundits who could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble are telling us that the United States desperately needs for the Chinese government to keep buying its debt. This crew of failed analysts argues that without the support of the Chinese government, interest rates in...

The elites hate to acknowledge it, but when large numbers of ordinary people are moved to action, it changes the narrow political world where the elites call the shots. Inside accounts reveal the extent to which Johnson and Nixon's conduct of the Vietnam War was constrained by the huge anti-war...

We all know that the economy is now recovering. The stock market is up by more than 50 percent from its March lows and Alan Greenspan, the former Maestro, is now projecting a 3.0 percent growth rate for the third quarter. Banks are again reporting strong profits and the Wall...

The budget situation today looks hugely worse than it did two years ago. The reason for the deterioration is not that the country has suddenly embarked on a massive new round of social spending, undertaken another major military adventure or even emptied the coffers through tax breaks. The reason that...

The large number of people who protested against Barack Obama's health care plan in Washington last week drew an enormous amount of media attention. Clearly some of the leaders are certifiably crazy, questioning whether Obama is an American and likening him to Hitler. But many of the protesters had reasonable...

We all know that there are basic philosophical differences between liberals and conservatives. Liberals believe that the government can be used to improve the lives of ordinary people. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that the government should redistribute money to the wealthy. This philosophical difference has come through very...

Robert Rubin's reputation has taken a serious hit in the last couple of years. After getting glowing reviews for his stint as treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, the world has now seen the fallout from the financial deregulation that he engineered and personally profited from to the tune of...

Suppose that a prominent member of Congress were to press for spending an additional $450 billion a year over the next three years on infrastructure projects. Suppose that they did this at a time when the unemployment rate was near 4.5 percent, the definition of full employment used by the...

I first met Ted Kennedy in the fall of 1995. The context was truly bizarre.

Alan Greenspan had testified to the Senate Finance Committee in the fall of 1994 that the consumer price index (CPI) overstated the true rate of inflation. He told the committee that if it lowered the...

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) will release a new set of economic and budget projections for the next decade on Tuesday. These projections are likely to show a cumulative deficit over the next 10 years that is $2 trillion higher (at 1 percent of GDP) than the deficit CBO projected...