Robert Kuttner

Berlin -- Ever since the march to European union began in the late 1940s, French-German collaboration has been at the heart of the project. Until the recent defeat of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, his close alliance with German Chancellor Angela Merkel continued this tradition, albeit on behalf of policies that...

ATHENS -- Europe is right on the edge of a needless calamity. One can view the European debacle through three lenses -- the weakness of European governmental institutions in a crisis; the excessive role of financial speculation in turning a moderate problem into a system-threatening disaster; and the purely self-interested...

PARIS -- The good news: Austerity is finally on the defensive. At the Camp David G-8 summit, all the other national leaders pressed German Chancellor Angela Merkel to relent and to allow Europe's ravaged economy to grow.

The bad news: The shift is mainly at the level...

On Tuesday, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation will hold its third annual fiscal summit. We need this event like we need a mass outbreak of sado-masochism.

If you wonder why all right-thinking people seem to have concluded that austerity is the royal road to economic recovery from a...

PARIS -- Watching the jubilation at the Place de la Bastille last night, where the Socialist candidate Francois Hollande was declared the next President of France precisely at 8:00 p.m., followed by delirious chants of "Sarkozy, c'est fini!" I couldn't help thinking of Grant Park, November '08.

I was thinking...

PARIS -- There is a celebrated observation of the 1920s Italian radical, Antonio Gramsci, that perfectly fits the economic paralysis of today's Europe: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms...

Forget the potential for an unpleasant October surprise emanating in Iran, Afghanistan, Israel, Pakistan or North Korea. The biggest threat to Barack Obama's re-election is the economic folly of our good friends in the European Union, who seem determined to snuff our their economic recovery -- and ours.

America's own...

I heard a terrific speech last Friday by the Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke.

In his address, to a Russell Sage-Century Foundation Conference on the causes and cure of the financial crisis, Chairman Bernanke said just about everything a progressive would want to hear. Read it for yourself...

A couplet keeps running through my head, a sinister variation on the chants from the Madison sit-ins and Zuccotti Park:

Tell me what Bipartisanship looks like
This is what Bipartisanship looks like

This past week, it looked like the JOBS Act. That's the legislation that sailed...

With the economy just barely on a path to durable recovery, some very dumb fiscal chickens are coming home to roost on January 1 of next year. This grim coincidence is known as the Triple Witching Hour.

First, the legacy of last summer's ill-fated bipartisan fiscal bargain -- an automatic...

The constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the subject of three days of oral argument before the Supreme Court beginning Monday, could well turn on whether the Court concludes that Congress can compel a citizen to buy a commercial product, in this case health insurance.

At the heart of...

Last week, speaking at the White House, President Obama announced that he was joining the European Union in filing a major trade complaint against China, for its export controls on so-called "rare earth" minerals. These are used in everything from micro-electronic devices like smartphones to flat-screen televisions, hybrid...

The economy added another 227,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department reported Friday. That's good news, sort of. It means that the recovery is slowly progressing. At this rate, we will be back to pre-recession employment levels sometime around 2018.

However, this growth in jobs was not enough for wages...

The bizarre comments of Rick Santorum on everything from contraception to JFK, combined with the tin ear of frontrunner Mitt ("Ann drives two Cadillacs") Romney, have been a gift from the gods to Barack Obama and the Democrats. And not just a random gift. Character, as the ancient Greeks said,...

Paul Volcker deserves better. In the hands of Tim Geithner's Treasury, the Rule named for Volcker supposedly limiting speculative mischief by government-guaranteed banks is fast becoming a cumbersome parody of itself.

Financial regulatory officials, at the behest of Wall Street, have turned a simple bright line into a convoluted...

Tom Friedman of the New York Times is at it again, claiming that what America needs to fix our economic and political mess is a radically centrist third party. Radical in this case means conservative when it comes to belt-tightening. Friedman in Sunday's Times urges a third party...

Last week, the New York City hotel workers union announced a stunning 7-year contract with the Big Apple's hotel industry providing for wage increases averaging 27 percent. The contract is due to be ratified by the membership Monday. The City's hotel trades council, whose master contract covers nearly...

The proposed $25 billion "settlement" of the mortgage servicing mess, scheduled to be made public any moment, must be a way station to much larger reductions of mortgage principal for underwater homeowners -- and much more serious consequences for the banks and their allies, whose fraudulent actions created...

The activation of the administration's long dormant task force on criminal misconduct in the financial collapse, with New York's progressive attorney general Eric Schneiderman as co-chair, could be the most fateful political and economic development of the election year. There are still immense pitfalls ahead, as Wall Street allies inside...

Many Democrats are congratulating themselves that the final two in the 2012 Republican field are a stuffed shirt who can't motivate his own base and a wild man who seems to inspire only fundamentalists and Tea Party fanatics. But let's not pop the champagne quite yet.

According to...