Clive Crook

I wouldn't go so far as to say Romney looked relaxed and confident in last night's GOP debate--he never looks relaxed and confident--but it was a much more effective performance than his others of late. This time it was Gingrich's turn to be feeble. Romney slapped him down very effectively on investments in Fannie and Freddie. (a) What is it about "blind trust" you don't understand? (b) Aside from being on their payroll, don't you have mutual-fund investments in… More »

The Peterson Institute recently staged a debate about the European debt crisis between Simon Johnson and Peter Boone in the pessimistic corner and Fred Bergsten and Jacob Funk Kirkegaard for the optimists. You can watch video here. In a column for Bloomberg I offer my two cents. I think Boone and Johnson are too gloomy about the short to medium term: I doubt that the euro system is going to collapse this time, despite the amazing dithering of the EU's leadership.… More »

The State of the Union was far too long, but what made me wince was the emphasis on outsourcing as the greatest threat to American prosperity. More »

As usual, Bill Galston has some good advice for the president. Including this: The plight of hard-working, hard-pressed Americans--those struggling to remain in the middle class and those struggling to get there--must be front and center. And the president must address it in the right way. A December 16 Gallup survey found that while 82 percent of Americans believe that it's extremely or very important to expand the economy and 70 percent believe that it's… More »

As I've mentioned before, Douglas Elliott at Brookings is among the most astutue analysts of the financial breakdown and the regulatory response to it. This recent testimony to Congress on the effects of the Volcker rule is the best commentary on the subject I've read. As I will explain, I believe that the Volcker Rule is fundamentally flawed and will do considerably more harm than good for the economy. I base this on two decades on Wall Street as well as on the… More »

Last night's Republican debate will most likely be remembered for Gingrich's assault on CNN's moderator, who kicked off by asking Gingrich to comment on his ex-wife's claim that he'd asked for an open marriage. Gingrich flattened him: that line of questioning was "as close to despicable as anything [he] could imagine". (He's apparently lacking in imagination.) The audience loved it. Down with the lamestream media. But my own main thought during the debate was to… More »

Things we thought we knew about central banking are no longer so clear. [T]he past three years have shown that central banking can't be above politics -- not, at any rate, for the reasons previously given. Whether aiming for stable prices makes sense is actually a complicated question. And the line that separates supposedly technical issues of monetary policy from the unavoidably political issues of taxes and public spending turns out be fuzzy.Why is the case for… More »

Morris Goldstein of the Peterson Institute for International Economics explains five main defects in the EU's efforts to resolve its banking crisis: Stop Coddling Europe's Banks. Incentives for deleveraging; Absence of firm guidelines on dividends and executive compensation; Omissions of a recession scenario and of an unweighted leverage ratio from the stress tests; Inequitable burden-sharing during debt restructuring; and Insufficient measures to permit an escape… More »

Some thoughts on the charge that Obama wants to turn the US into an entitlement society.Mitt Romney likes to contrast the U.S. economic system with Europe's welfare state. You can have a merit society, he says, or an entitlement society, but not both -- and an entitlement society is where the U.S. is heading if Barack Obama and the Democrats get their way.It's a favorite Republican theme, and you can see why. For one thing, there's some truth to it. Contrasting the… More »

Lawrence Lindsey makes the case for Anybody But Romney by pointing out that "safe" candidates--"low-beta" candidates, he calls them--have a poor record in presidential elections. It's a cute idea. If you're behind, take a chance. Lindsey reckons Obama has the edge, other things equal, in November (the net effect of incumbency, which helps him, and the bad economy, which doesn't). So the GOP should gamble on a high-beta candidate who will shake things up. With… More »

Another column for your consideration:With the world's rich economies struggling and the leaders of the European Union intent on making things worse, the gravity of the economic crisis still confronting the West is hard to exaggerate. Nonetheless, it can be done.According to what I read, we face not just the worst recession since the 1930s, but a challenge to the West's entire economic order. The Great Recession exposes the poverty of orthodox economics. It… More »

I was glad to see Jason DeParle's piece in the NYT about America's disappointing record on economic mobility. One thing I learned: some conservatives have actually mentioned the issue. Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a Republican candidate for president, warned this fall that movement "up into the middle income is actually greater, the mobility in Europe, than it is in America." National Review, a conservative thought leader, wrote that "most… More »

Ron Fournier of National Journal says something that hadn't occurred to me about Iowa and what comes next.If Romney wins New Hampshire, he would be the first non-incumbent Republican to sweep Iowa and the Granite State since the modern caucuses were formed. There is a reason why that's never been done: Republican coalitions in Iowa and New Hampshire are mirror images of one another and, taken together, reflect the broad GOP electorate. In other words, a candidate… More »

You might be interested in this column I wrote for Bloomberg View about inequality. I argue that the US preoccupation with this subject misses two main things. First, by international standards, the US tax system is not unusually gentle on the rich, it is unusually gentle on the non-rich. Second, the US is indeed an outlier when it comes to policies affecting inequality--not because of the way its tax system works, but because it spends so little on support for the… More »

The president will have a more relaxed Christmas, I imagine, than the one he was expecting a month ago. His poll ratings have improved a lot in the past few weeks. It's too soon for him to be confident of re-election, obviously, but things are looking up. Why? One possibility is that his new and more partisan posture--the Kansas speech, class warfare and all that--is paying off. I doubt it though. If I were advising him, I'd still caution against the newly… More »

Among writers I read and admire, my Atlantic colleague Jeff Goldberg achieved a rare distinction lately: in the past fortnight he has written two of the worst columns I have read all year and one of the best. More »

The quarrel over Politifact's "Lie of the Year" is missing the point. The fact-checker gave its annual accolade to the Democrats' claim that Paul Ryan's budget plan would "end Medicare". Liberals are rightly annoyed. Paul Krugman says Politifact is dead to him: guilty of False Balance, a capital crime. He reckons their calculation was obvious. Politifact's previous Lies of the Year were Republican lies: facts be damned, it was time for a Democratic winner. As… More »

In a new column for Bloomberg View I argue that the banks' resistance to much stricter capital requirements is both wrong and dishonest: Real Reasons Bankers Don't Like Basel's Rules.[Bankers] are being disingenuous. They do have reasons, valid after a fashion, for opposing higher capital requirements, just not reasons they can admit. The one they emphasize -- cost of funding and its effect on future lending -- is fit for public use, but bogus.What might their real… More »

Project Syndicate reprints Havel's remarks in 1998 on a question that has some relevance for US politics just now: Do intellectuals belong in politics? Yes, he says, we need them--but they have to be of the right kind.I am convinced that the purpose of politics does not consist in fulfilling short-term wishes. A politician should also seek to win people over to his own ideas, even when unpopular. Politics must entail convincing voters that the politician… More »

Interesting data in the latest Allstate-National Journal poll, both on the country's political mood and on the focus of this latest installment in the series: retirement. The financial anxieties of "near-retirees" come through loud and clear. This survey shows that among Americans age 50+ who have not yet retired ("near-retirees"), the recession has cast a shadow on their retirement plans and they find themselves with a completely different perspective than… More »