Here is a fine example of why a despairing President Truman once said, "Bring me a one-armed economist." Our quote of the day comes from Martin N. Baily, an economist at the Brookings Institution, who was once on President Bill Clinton Council of Economic Advisers. The quote, incidentally, was the...

Barack Obama may soon find that he is committing a big sin against one of the major premises of the reigning ideology. As part of his plan to restructure the auto industry, rebuild infrastructure, and create new green industries and jobs, he will be committing industrial policy. And this will...

President-elect Obama's appointment of Mary Schapiro to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission does not augur well for Obama's commitment to get at the roots of the financial crisis. Schapiro, who heads one of our broken financial system's main institutions of self-regulation, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, is known as...

Barack Obama has made it very clear that he intends to govern as a bridge-builder. Ideology is a bad word in Obamaland. He will lead as a pragmatist, and also reach across the aisle to Republicans.

This stance has stimulated a passionate debate among progressives, on HuffingtonPost...

As progressives, we can view President-Elect Obama's emerging economic team in one of two ways. Either he has disappointed us by picking a group of Clinton retreads--the very people who brought us the deregulation that produced the financial collapse; the fiscal conservatives who in the 1990s put budget balance ahead...

A very dubious Wall Street rescue package went down to defeat Monday because the Republican leadership double-crossed the Democrats. Neither party was thrilled with this bill--it might not work; it was too tilted to Wall Street; constituents were outraged. So the deal was that both parties had to share responsibility.

I had the near-death experience of watching the first presidential debate with a small group of hard core liberal intellectuals. The consensus in the room was that McCain won, and that Obama was surprisingly weak. McCain stuck to his message that Obama was naïve, that he "didn't get it." McCain...

As the events of the past 24 hours have shown, the Republicans lack both the leadership and the unity to bring home any variant on Paulson's proposed bailout deal. This has been a special fiasco for John McCain, and a richly deserved one.

With the Republicans now in thorough disarray,...

Physicists, historians, and economists talk about "path dependence." Something that is far from ideal persists, only because we are stuck with a particular path. A favorite example is the QWERTY typewriter -- it is far less efficient than other arrangements of letters, but we all learned on it and are...

Support for the Paulson plan continued to unravel late Monday and Tuesday morning, as the Treasury Secretary prepared to face two days of scorching hearings on Capitol Hill. In many ways Paulson is the worst possible ambassador for a plan that would give him carte blanche to bail out Wall...

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson spent the past two weeks playing a game of chicken with firms like Lehman Brothers and A.I.G. Now he is playing even higher-stakes chicken with Congress and the economy.

Paulson's storyline is that the credit markets are frozen, and unless Congress passes a "clean bill" --...

This week, historians will record, was a game-changer in two key respects.

First, the free-market chickens finally came home to roost.

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who came to Washington from Wall Street with an elaborate agenda of further deregulation the better to enable firms like his own Goldman Sachs to...

The progressive Section 527 groups, such as America Votes, have been gathering all this week, determined to save the Obama campaign from its own gentle post-partisanship. They began aggressively recruiting large donors, to finance the tough TV spots that the Obama campaign has mostly avoided to date. I attended one...

Sometimes, the fates deliver.

This past weekend, they delivered a worsening of America's financial crisis, which is the direct result of rightwing economic policies of deregulating Wall Street. Some Democrats colluded in these policies, but their essence was Republican ideology. Under George W. Bush, misguided theories of deregulation were entangled...

Note: I found this one page on the sidewalk outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington. I can't vouch for its authenticity-RK:

TRANSLATION: MANDARIN TO ENGLISH
From: Geng Huichang, Ministry of State Security
To: Zhou Wenzhong, Chinese Ambassador to the United States
Re: Request for evaluation of PALIN, SARAH

Security Classification:...

You do all kinds of dubious things when you're promoting a book. But when my publisher suggested that I accept an invitation to appear on Fox's "Hannity and Colmes," I was a bit skeptical. I've been on O'Reilly a few times over the years, and have stopped doing it, because...

So who is the grinch who stole Obama's passion? Maybe Obama himself.

Obama fans should be reassured that he has been in this funk before, and has managed to get his mojo back. However, the anxious class has good reason to be anxious.

Obama's particular brand of post-partisanship seems to...

So what is the connection between Barack Obama's core beliefs, his campaign advisers, and his rather lackluster performance since Denver?

Last night, I had an intriguing encounter with Cass Sunstein, a member of Obama's kitchen cabinet. The occasion was the fall kickoff event at Boston's JFK Presidential Library, where Sunstein,...

In the past several days, before the U.S. Treasury Department acted to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, several people asked me if I thought it was a good idea for the government to "nationalize" the two mortgage giants. In virtually none of the coverage of the Bush administration's latest...

On Thursday, John McCain pledged to end partisan rancor. On Wednesday, his running mate, Sarah Palin, and the rest of his crew did everything possible to stir it up. This will evidently be the nice-cop/bad cop act through the campaign.

As if to rain on McCain's parade, the unemployment rate...