In the showdown over regulation of potentially toxic securities like credit-default swaps, the savviest and toughest battler for effective legislation turns out to be not Barney Frank or Chris Dodd, who chair the key House and Senate financial committees. Surprisingly, the best informed and most relentless crusader is not a...

President Obama has announced a White House Jobs Summit for next month. At least that's the beginning of recognition that the unemployment rate is unacceptable. The measured rate is now 10.2 percent, but if you count people who have given up or who are involuntarily working part time, the real...

What a long, strange year it's been since Election Night 2008. Whatever this administration has represented so far, it has not yet delivered change we can believe in.

We need a radical break with Wall Street, and we got the politics of prop up and bail out -- with the...

As unemployment continues to rise, deficit hawks are upping their efforts to use the economic crisis as a pretext for gutting basic social programs such as Social Security and Medicare. The idea keeps surfacing for a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission, supposedly insulated from politics, which would agree to mandatory caps on...

Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who turned a once-progressive party into Tory-lite, is now in line to be the first President of Europe. Given Blair's central role in creating the conditions that invited Britain's financial collapse, this idea makes about as much sense as putting protégés of Bob...

If the unemployment numbers keep rising into 2010, the Republicans are primed to pick up dozens of seats in the House, crippling the Obama administration's capacity to recoup in the second half of the president's first term. Obama would lose his very tenuous working majority and would confront a situation...

You know how far politics has swung to the right when the most left wing guy in the room is the former chairman of the Federal Reserve. But that's what financial reform has come to.

Paul Volcker was an early backer of Barack Obama. He counseled Obama on one of...

One prime cause of the financial collapse is that financial trading markets have become speculative worlds unto themselves. Instead of adding efficiency to the real economy, they mainly add risk that the rest of us now have to pay for.

There are many ways to damp down financial speculation, but...

On this Labor Day, about the best the Obama Administration can say (over and over again) is that the unemployment picture would be a lot worse without the Recovery Act. Sorry, that's not good enough. It won't be good enough for the Democrats to hold onto swing seats in next...

Will somebody please explain to me why Barack Obama is still on his bipartisan kick?

Ever since Obama's first efforts to reach out to Republicans, with his cabinet appointment of two Republicans, Gates at Defense and LaHood at Transportation, and his appeasement of Republican tax-cutting demands in the stimulus package,...

The Obama administration enjoyed a moment of triumphalism this past week. The economy lost only 247,000 jobs in July, and due to a statistical oddity the unemployment rate actually dropped a tenth of a point, to 9.4 percent rather than rising to 9.7 as had been predicted. President Obama briefly...

President Obama wanted health insurance reform in the worst way. And at the rate things are going, he is likely to get it.

Let's review the bidding -- first the substance, then the politics. America spends 15 percent of its GDP covering far less than the entire population, while other...

The New York Times recently reported that the latest scheme--or scam--on Wall Street is something called High Frequency Trading. Very sophisticated financial firms, such as Goldman Sachs, are tipped off by the New York Stock Exchange's own computers to pending buy and sell orders. Armed with ultra sophisticated computer algorithms,...

Question for the day: Where is the economic recovery going to come from?

We are still at the stage of the recession where economic downdrafts are producing more downdrafts. Reduced purchasing power leads to fewer retail and factory sales and more layoffs, further reducing consumer demand. The Obama stimulus...

Several events of the past week should be a wake-up call to the Obama administration. Bottom line: the medicine isn't working. Stronger stuff is needed. Consider:

The June Unemployment Numbers. The green-shoots school was expecting that the rising rate of unemployment would continue to slow, as...

Reuters is out with an authoritative story on finalists being considered for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the investigative body created by Congress to launch a full-scale investigation of the financial crisis in the spirit of the famous early 1930s hearings led by Ferdinand Pecora.

Those famous investigative...

I'm sure I'm not the only reader who noticed the juxtaposition of two front page stories in Sunday's New York Times dealing with health care. The first article cited a new Times-CBS poll showing that 72 percent of Americans favored a government run health plan comparable to Medicare, which...

The European left, such as it is, got clobbered in the recent elections for the European parliament. In the next parliament, center-right parties will have almost twice as many seats as social democrats. Of left parties, only the Greens gained slightly. Far-right nationalistic parties picked up strength.

There is a huge reality gap between the happy talk about green shoots, banks passing stress tests, the rise in unemployment slowing -- and what's happening out in the real economy, especially if you take a close look at banking and housing, ground zero of the economic crisis. Credit remains...

In 1932 through 1934 the Senate Banking Committee, led by its Chief Counsel Ferdinand Pecora, ferreted out the deeper fraud and corruption that led to the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The Pecora Committee's findings helped change the political mood, and laid the groundwork for the sweeping financial...