James Kwak

It seems as if the Republicans, meaning both John Boehner and Mitt Romney, are trying to turn the national debt back into a major political issue. Now, a visitor from Mars might wonder how this is possible. How could a party that (a) passed the massive...

I haven't been writing about the JPMorgan debacle because, well, everyone else is writing about it. One theme that has stuck out for me, however, has been everyone's reflexive surprise that this could happen at JPMorgan, supposedly the best and most competent of the big banks. For example,

From Mitt Romney's closed-door fundraiser yesterday, courtesy of NBC:

"I'm going to probably eliminate for high income people the second home mortgage deduction," Romney said, adding that he would also likely eliminate deductions for state income and property taxes as well.

"By virtue of doing that,...

James Stewart has doubled down on his infatuation with Paul Ryan. Ryan's budget, he says, is a viable centrist starting point for budget negotiations, and attacks from "left and right" are mere "partisan rhetoric."

This is several different kinds of crazy. First, Stewart repeats his belief that Ryan's...

Apparently the thing we need to keep ourselves safe is a fast, lightweight ship that can sweep mines, launch helicopters, fight submarines, and perform other assorted duties -- but can't withstand heavy combat. I don't claim to know if we really need the Littoral Combat Ship to ensure our national...

Everyone should know by now that the Treasury Department can borrow money at historically low rates. That is a major reason why some very smart economists think that the federal government should borrow more money in the short term (i.e., this year and next) and use that money...

I generally don't bother reading Thomas Friedman. A good friend gave me a copy of The World Is Flat, and I started reading it. Somewhere in the first one hundred pages Friedman has an extended discussion of workflow software (as a key enabler of globalization) and I realized that he...

A year ago, Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin published a paper based on their in-depth interviews of Tea Party activists. A longer presentation of their research was published as a book a few months ago, and I was reminded of it by historian Daniel...

Ezra Klein wrote a column for Bloomberg discussing research by political scientist Suzanne Mettler and some of her collaborators. Mettler studies what she calls the "submerged state" -- the growing tendency of government programs to provide benefits in ways that mask the fact that they come from the...

Mark Thoma provides an excerpt from Noam Scheiber on Peter Orszag's attempt to let all of the Bush tax cuts expire. In short, Orszag wanted to extend the "middle-class" tax cuts for two years (letting the tax cuts for the rich expire); then he expected the middle-class tax...

Floyd Norris has written another good column skewering the Republican candidates' tax proposals. It's not hard: all you have to do is list the many ways they want to cut taxes -- which make George W. Bush look like a veritable communist, out to confiscate all private wealth...

From The New York Times:

Congressional Republicans in recent days have blocked efforts by Democrats to extend the jobless aid, saying they would insist on offsetting the $56 billion cost with spending cuts elsewhere.

Instead, as it turns out, they agreed to offset the cost with tax cuts...

There have been (admittedly unclear) indications from your administration that you may accede to the Republicans’ demand to extend the Bush tax cuts for everyone. I urge you not to do this.

The question is: Is it better to extend the tax cuts for everyone or...

"Geithner's team spent much of its time during the debate over the Senate bill helping Senate Banking Committee chair Chris Dodd kill off or modify amendments being offered by more-progressive Democrats. A good example was Bernie Sanders's measure to audit the Fed, which the administration played a key...

Robert Reich discusses a theme that I think I've discussed before (and first heard expressed by Ezra Klein):

"The most important thing to know about the 1,500 page financial reform bill passed by the Senate last week -- now on he way to being reconciled with the...

Tyler Cowen agrees with our argument in 13 Bankers that there is a confluence of interests between the financial sector and the government that results in policies that are generally favorable to the banks. Cowen argues, however, that it is Washington, not Wall Street, that is...

One major proposal of 13 Bankers is setting caps on the size of financial institutions, with the goals of preventing the existence of banks that are too big to fail and of eliminating the competitive distortions created by megabanks. We propose that no institution should have assets greater than 4...

Press release here. Complaint here. The allegation is that Goldman failed to disclose the role that John Paulson's hedge fund played in selecting residential mortgage-backed securities that went into a CDO created by Goldman. Here's paragraph 3 of the complaint:

In sum, GS&Co arranged a...

My three-year-old daughter, looking at 13 Bankers, said, "It doesn't have any pictures." (She was hoping for a book about yaks.) Actually, it has a few pictures, although they are just pictures of data. But those pictures themselves tell an interesting story.

The first part of the story...

According to many observers, the global financial system and economy slipped on a world-historical banana peel, causing the recent financial crisis and the most severe recession since the Great Depression. It was all a gigantic accident caused by mistaken models and excess optimism. In October 2008, Alan Greenspan...