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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

Summers on the Shitpile

By Matthew Yglesias
Mar 31 2008, 9:36 AM ET Comment

Lawrence Summers pronounces himself optimistic that actions already taken have set the stage for us to avoid further financial calamities and get back on the road to recovery without major dislocations. But he says we ought to take several further steps, including passing the Dodd-Frank bill to reduce foreclosures, and that efforts need to be made to get financial institutions to raise more capital and for the shareholders in the GSEs to accept more obligations to the public rather than have "their shareholders’ 'heads I win, tails you lose' bet with the taxpayer be expanded for this purpose."

In general, Summers says that "at a time when much is being given to financial institution shareholders and management, action to help the economy and protect the taxpayer should be expected in return." This seems right to me. It doesn't make sense to let large institutions fail purely out of spite at a time when it's possible to rescue them and keep the economy humming along. But with great power to fail in a way that brings down the whole economy ought to come great responsibility to submit yourself to formal or informal regulatory oversight. Meanwhile, we need measures like Dodd-Frank and, in general, a social safety net that works for the broad public and not just for large financial institutions.

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