krebscycle

  • PBS Untouchables is unbelievably naive on the financial crisis

    The producers of the PBS “expose” on the Financial Crisis are at their most hapless when they allow GOP Senator Chuck Grassley to pretend to be outraged by the lack of prosecutions after the financial crisis. Grassley has spent 30 years in the Senate, he was the Chairman of the…

  • Simon Johnson and the Libertarian Critique of Geithner

    Much of what has been billed “criticism from the left” of the Obama Administration ( or criticism from the progressive point of view) has actually been criticism from the Libertarian point of view.  Like every other “progressive” who has attempted to write an obituary for Tim Geithner’s term as Treasury…

  • Dear Progressives: Keynes was not a supporter of GW Bush

    Absolutely nothing in Keynes work implies that reducing government spending  and/or  reducing the government deficit necessarily  reduces economic activity. The so-called liberals or progressives who keep claiming otherwise are confusing themselves.  For example, the government spent $122,000,000,000 in Afghanistan last year. If we immediately withdrew from Afghanistan at a cost…

  • Black cats and white cats

    First posted on The People’s View in 2011. Here’s a story about the work of Ron Bloom, President Obama’s manufacturing adviser and what he heard from executives at manufacturing firms in Northeast Ohio. In some cases, they called for a more expansive government role in manufacturing, along the lines of…

  • Marcy Kaptur’s rhetoric

    First published in DailyKos June 2011. (minor edits in this version) A Daily Kos diary implicitly asks the question – why don’t President Obama and other Democratic politicians say the things that Marcy Kaptur says – the kind of “down and dirty” attacks on the plutocracy that so many “progressives”…

  • Who is naive

    Previously published in the People’s View. and then in the DailyKos. You know, if you care about making investments in our kids and making investments in our infrastructure and making investments in basic research then you should want our fiscal house in order so that every time we propose a…

  • The Reactionary Left and Financial Market Reform

    Suppose that Congress took a step to channel low cost Federal loans to small community banks and community lending institutions – like  micro-lending non-profits that specifically make capital available to people shut out of the normal banking system.  And suppose that reform had already increased small business lending. Or suppose…

  • Matt Taibbi’s big con

    Matt Taibbi is so good at whipping up indignation about the evil bankers that it’s easy to overlook the crackpot and diversionary nature of the story he is telling. It would be useful if there was public pressure, for example, to provide a postal bank that would give people an…

  • A modest proposal for free market bank reform

    The reason we have this huge, complex, and inefficient bank regulation system is that history shows there will be bank panics. If there is bank panic in an industrial economy, the effects are devastating and long-lasting. Bank collapse triggers bank collapse in a spreading circle that, in the absence of…

  • Philosophy for us rats

    If we believe we came out of the universe, not it out of us, we must admit that we do not know what we are talking about when we speak of brute matter. We do know that a certain complex of energies can wag its tail and another can make…