Conor Clarke is the editor, with Michael Kinsley, of Creative Capitalism. He was previously a fellow at The Atlantic and an editor at The Guardian. More
Barack Obama's comments on Chrysler were pretty short, so I've pasted them after the jump. (The "laughter" was right there in the official White House transcript.) No big surprises, except that the smackdown between the administration and the non-cooperative creditors was a little more explicit than you might have expected. Obama:While many stakeholders made sacrifices and worked constructively, I have to tell you some did not. In particular, a group of… More »
So Chrysler is headed for bankruptcy, and Obama is headed to the podium at 12pm to deliver comments on the state of the auto industry. More details will spill out today, along with top management at the company and various recriminations between the government and the creditors. But the Chrysler bankruptcy is not a surprise -- it's been likely since last month's viability determination (pdf) -- and it's not clear that it changes all that much. More »
Google has a cool new feature that lets you play around with publicly available data. Search for "unemployment rate" and the top result should be a tool that lets you compare changes in unemployment around the country. You can, for example, graph the total US rate and compare it to the rate in a few counties in Michigan, home of the American auto industry: More »
If there's still mileage in the Tea Party story, it's now Barack Obama's fault! At his 100th-day townhall meeting in St. Louis, the president said:"Those of you who are watching certain news channels on which I'm not very popular, and you see folks waving tea bags around, let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we are going to stabilize Social Security."… More »
The fact that the US economy contracted by 6.1% in the first quarter of 2009 is crappy, but only slightly surprising. This, on the other hand, is pretty strange:Federal government spending decreased 4.0%, after rising in the fourth quarter by 7.0%. State and local government outlays fell 3.9%, after going down by 2.0% in the fourth quarter.Why on earth is federal government spending falling, after rising last quarter? The whole Keynesian theory, love it or leave it… More »
Can we afford to fix our financial systems? The answer is yes. We cannot afford not to fix them. The big question is rather how best to do so. But fixing the financial system, while essential, is not enough.The International Monetary Fund's latest Global Financial Stability Report provides a cogent and sobering analysis of the state of the financial system. The staff have raised their estimates of the writedowns to close to $4,400bn (€3,368bn, £3,015bn). This is… More »
The slumping U.S. economy barely improved early this year, with businesses slashing spending and inventories, according to a surprising report indicating the recession didn't ease as much as expected.Gross domestic product decreased at a seasonally adjusted 6.1% annual rate January through March despite rising consumer spending, the Commerce Department said Wednesday in its first estimate of first-quarter GDP.The 6.1% drop was much bigger than Wall Street expected… More »
The fact that Emmanuel Saez won the John Bates Clark medal seems like a reasonably decent excuse to write one more time about tax progressivity. Saez is best known in the blogosphere for his work on inequality, but he has also written many papers on optimal tax theory and empirical tax history. Indeed, the JBC Medal commendation says his work has created a "resurgence of academic interest in taxation," and what that lacks in sexiness it might make up for in fact.… More »
It's probably not a good sign for Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis that, a day before the company's shareholder meeting, the largest public pension fund in the country says it will vote against him. From the press release: More »
Via Matt Yglesias, I see that soon-to-be Democrat Arlen Specter supports a flat tax. Indeed, he has introduced flat tax legislation since 1995 -- often energetically, and with Grover Norquist at his side. "Flat tax" is a bit of a slippery term -- after all, Rahm Emanuel and Ron Wyden once introduced a flat tax -- but the Specter version isn't especially complicated. It would be a 20% tax on individual and business income, with a few deductions kept around for good… More »
Will the Wall Street Journal be the biggest newspaper in the country? It might, but not for an especially happy reason. New details on newspaper circulation came out yesterday afternoon and -- who'da thought -- they aren't pretty:The average daily circulation of U.S. newspapers declined 7% in the six-month period ending March 31, according to the latest data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, reflecting an increased rate of decline over the last two measured… More »
Ed Glaeser has a post over at Times' Economix blog that makes a couple of nice points about state taxes, in response to New York's decision to impose a "temporary Personal Income Tax Surcharge" on taxpayers earning more than $500,000 a year. More »
Regulators have told Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. that the banks may need to raise more capital based on early results of the government's so-called stress tests of lenders, according to people familiar with the situation.The capital shortfall amounts to billions of dollars at Bank of America, based in Charlotte, N.C., people familiar with the bank said.Executives at both banks are objecting to the preliminary findings, which emerged from the government… More »
The United Auto Workers union would eventually own 55% of the stock in a restructured Chrysler LLC under the deal reached by the union and the auto maker, according to a summary of the agreement that was reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.Fiat SpA "eventually" will own 35%, and the U.S. government and Chrysler's secured lenders together will end up owning 10% of the company once it is reorganized, that summary said.The summary was distributed Monday evening at a… More »
The administration's website for tracking the stimulus spending, recovery.gov, has started to fill up with loads of useful information that is worth checking out. In particular, take a look at the spending updates. Bob Williams of the wonderful TaxVox blog says the spending has "gotten off to an encouraging start" and we should "watch to see how the game plays out." I agree with the latter part: It's too early to judge the stimulus. But I really don't see what's so… More »
The administration's website for tracking the stimulus spending, recovery.gov, has started to fill up with loads of useful information that is worth checking out. In particular, take a look at the spending updates. Bob Williams of the wonderful TaxVox blog says the spending has "gotten off to an encouraging start" and we should "watch to see how the game plays out." I agree with the latter part: It's too early to judge the stimulus. But I really don't see what's… More »
It seems unlikely that photographs will ever die, but will photography? Esquire's cover this month -- Transformers' Megan Fox -- was shot in video, with a single frame selected for the cover. I can't tell the difference. So I wonder: will we need still-frame photography in the future if video cameras can do the trick? More »
One consequence of reading Margaret Talbot's New Yorker piece on neuro-enhancing drugs is that it made we want some. (Indeed, the piece itself had a nice way of pulling this off, since my attention span is so addled by the Internet that it took me about three sittings to finish it.) But in addition to all sorts of ethical questions -- is the appropriate analogy steroids at the ballpark or plastic surgery at the beach? -- the existence of productivity enhancing… More »
The New York Times was kind to post a big PDF of Tim Geithner's schedule from when he was head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and I spent most of the morning wandering through it for items of interest. I've put some raw quantitative data -- who did he meet with, and how often? -- after the jump.But the most interesting detail, in a way, is the dog that didn't bark: I can't find any mentions of Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, or transition head John Podesta in… More »
The New York Times was kind to post a big PDF of Tim Geithner's schedule from when he was head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and I spent most of the morning wandering through it for items of interest. I've put some raw quantitative data -- who did he meet with, and how often? -- after the jump.But the most interesting detail, in a way, is the dog that didn't bark: I can't find any mentions of Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, or transition head John Podesta in… More »
