The New Republic

Here are a few headlines from the Wall Street Journal's opinion section over the past year:Big Labor's Wisconsin Vendetta (January 24, 2012)Big Labor's Premium (June 6, 2012) READ MORE >>

As I predicted, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's calendar-freezing machinations to reform the filibuster turned out to be much ado about nothing. Reid and McConnell have struck a deal to eliminate filibusters on "motions to proceed," leaving intact filibusters on the actual legislation. In exchange, the minority will be guaranteed the chance to bring two amendments to the floor. READ MORE >>

Say this for Alan S. Blinder: the man has not been jaded. His new book on the Wall Street meltdown, After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead, is animated by a lay person’s sense of wonder and—at times—horror at the country’s financial mess. READ MORE >>

 LA: Your predecessor Hank Paulson in his book describes how at the height of the crisis he would have sleepless nights, worrying that a giant financial collapse was going to occur on his watch and that he would go down in history as the Herbert Hoover of the current era. Your colleagues all say you are remarkably calm, even in the middle of a crisis.TG: Well I was very worried throughout that period of time. Starting in August of ’07 I had moments of deep, serious concern about the future. The hardest part for me was that period between when we knew we faced an existential threat of collapse but before we figured out what we were going to be able to do. Before we figured out the contours of our plan.LA: Was that from Lehman onwards?TG: I would say from the end of December of ’07, there was a great sense of foreboding, gathering storm, forces beyond our control. Even as early as back in August of ’07. But it dramatically worsened in the fall of ’08, of course.LA: When you took office in January, we had had TARP, we had had all of those guarantees in place, and yet they still didn’t seem to be working. There was still a run on Citi, still a run on Bank of America.TG: When I first met the President in October of ’08, when he was then a senator, a candidate running, I remember saying to him that the steps that Hank Paulson, Bernanke and I and others took earlier in the fall had broken the financial panic. But at that stage the economy was still eroding at an accelerating pace and the financial system was still completely frozen. So yes, it was getting worse. When the President took office, when I came in in January, at that point we were still at the edge of the abyss. And we now know in retrospect that the economy was shrinking at an annual rate of 9 percent and the global economy was in a state of near freefall too. It felt pretty bad.LA: The way you dealt with the financial crisis will go down as your signature achievement. It turned out to be remarkably successful economically. But you yourself have said that while you saved the economy, you lost the public. Was there any way of making politics of this work?TG: I think that’s a great question. I think it’s hard for any of us to know. My own view was that it was going to be very hard, if not impossible to design a financial rescue that was going to be effective in protecting all the innocent victims hit by the crisis and still satisfy the completely understandable public desire for justice and accountability. Those things were in direct and tragic tension, never resolvable at that time. I always felt that the only preoccupation for people in policy at the time should be to fix the problem as quickly as we could, as effectively as we could, and only after that would other things be possible, including how to figure out not just how to clean up the mess, but reform the financial system.LA: One of the ways that people have figured out in the past to reconcile the politics was to go populist. That was what Roosevelt did. You, on the other hand, had been resolutely against that. You refer to it as Old Testament justice, implying that while it may be emotionally satisfying, it doesn’t serve any purpose.TG: I never used that phrase as a pejorative description. I just used it as a simple shorthand to refer to the understandable need people had for justice. But the President didn’t ask me to come do this to be the architect of a political strategy. I never felt that was my thing. I had some views on the issue, but I didn’t give them much weight. I thought my job was to figure out the financial parts.LA: Was the talk about “fat cat bankers” counterproductive?TG: I’m biased but I felt that in the basic strategy that the President embraced and that we put into effect, we did something that was incredibly effective for the broad interest of the economy and the financial system. I feel the President’s rhetoric over that period of time was very moderate relative to the populist rage sweeping across the country. And I never quite understood why the financial community took such offense at what was such moderate rhetoric relative to what we have seen in other periods in history. READ MORE >>

In the middle of last summer, as the presidential race was heading into its home stretch, there was a flurry of news about layoffs at Ohio coal mines owned by Murray Energy, whose more than 3,000 employees make it the largest privately-headed coal-mining concern in the country. Murray announced that it was going to shut down one mine entirely in September or October -- the Red Bird West mine, a surface-mining operation in Brilliant, Ohio that employed 56 people under the subsidiary name OhioAmerican Energy. READ MORE >>

Kobe Bryant is suffering a midseason crisis. Back in October, with 16 years and five championships under his belt with the Los Angeles Lakers, Bryant had looked to his new super-team—stocked with the aging, future Hall of Fame guard Steve Nash and the veteran big men Dwight Howard and Pau Gasol—as his last, best chance to match or even surpass the six titles won by Michael Jordan, his idol and the rarely disputed Greatest of All Time. READ MORE >>

ISTANBUL—Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, will undoubtedly be remembered for many things. In the ten years since his Justice and Development Party (AKP) first assumed control of the Turkish parliament, he has substantially improved the Turkish economy and established Turkey as a diplomatic leader in the Middle East; he has ushered Islam back into Turkish public life, downgraded the influence of the Turkish military, and imposed severe crackdowns on Turkish journalists. READ MORE >>

There is no better example of social and economic policy discussion as an idle pastime for the rich than the World Economic Forum at Davos. These guys make the millionaire schmoozers at the Aspen Ideas Festival look like short-order cooks. READ MORE >>

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