Clive Crook

Why did Standard and Poor's move the markets when it changed the outlook for its AAA rating of US government from "stable" to "negative"--meaning it sees a one-in-three chance of less-than-AAA within two years? S&P adduces no new information that I can see. Competent ratings of opaque instruments such as, oh, mortgage-backed securities would be very useful to investors (not that ratings agencies troubled to provide competent ratings in that case, obviously).… More »

The US has not made a "fundamental shift" toward fiscal discipline More »

The president delivered no real plan for cutting $4 trillion More »

Probably nothing new More »

Have Republicans overplayed their hand? More »

If the parties can't agree, Social Security and Medicare won't change More »

The better employment figures are welcome, but the economy remains vulnerable at many points, and especially to another setback in the housing market. Before the expansion is at all secure, macro policy is turning prematurely from expansionary to neutral (monetary policy) and from neutral to contractionary (fiscal policy). As I note in this column for the FT, Fed officials are divided about the future of quantitative easing - the bond buying programme the central… More »

It's hard to see how the GOP's spending plan will lead to compromise or actual policy More »

Ruth Marcus is right that Obama relies far too much on the rhetorical device of the "false choice". He's made it a cliché. Obama's speciality, she says, is the false false choice: Set up two unacceptable extremes that no one is seriously advocating and position yourself as the champion of the reasonable middle ground between these unidentified straw men. Thus, Obama on health care, stretching back to the presidential campaign: "I reject the tired old… More »

I don't know how much credibility Alan Greenspan still has when it comes to financial regulation, but the comments he makes in this FT column about the inadequacies of Dodd-Frank seem mostly right to me. It is true, and very important, that the act... fails to capture the degree of global interconnectedness of recent decades which has not been substantially altered by the crisis of 2008. The ridiculous complexity of the new regime--the US now has more regulators,… More »

In the end, it won't matter very much More »

I don't think it is possible for Obama to be as decisive a multilateralist as Europe wants him to be More »

Roger Pielke, Jr., environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado, draws my attention to this chart on relative radiation doses. Well worth a look. More »

The future of the reform is uncertain. The constitutional skirmish is over, but is it actually good policy? More »

When it comes to the Fukushima disaster, the worst may be over. Now, the thing we have to fear, one professor says, is fear itself. More »

They got the kind of U.S. president they asked for, and had better learn to like it More »

To put it mildly, this is quite a moment for the UN, and for US relations with that institution More »

I recommend this interview with Larry Summers in The International Economy. More »

I still don't understand the outer limit of the emergency, but my guess is that this knowledge would be reassuring rather than panic-inducing More »

Like everybody else, no doubt, I am finding it difficult to pay attention to anything but the catastrophe in Japan More »