The New Republic

In early February I suggested there was a showdown underway between the US Treasury and the country's largest banks.  Treasury (with the Fed and other regulators) is responsible for the safety and soundness of the financial system, the banks are mostly looking out for their own executives, and the tension between these goals is - by now - quite evident. READ MORE >>

Back in October, not long after Lehman Brothers collapsed and triggered a meltdown on Wall Street, one of the hottest e-mail forwards making the rounds among finance types was a letter by Andrew Lahde, a hedge-fund manager who had posted eye-popping 866 percent returns in 2008 by betting on increases in U.S. subprime mortgage defaults. READ MORE >>

Simon Johnson is a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He is co-founder of the global economy website, BaselineScenario.com.   READ MORE >>

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression By Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, 464 pp., $26.95) Herbert Hoover By William E. Leuchtenburg (Times Books, 208 pp., $22) Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America By Adam Cohen (Penguin Press, 372 pp., $29.95) READ MORE >>

Republicans like to accuse Democrats of wasting taxpayer dollars and being condescending eggheads. But if President Obama's economic stimulus fails to prevent a depression--and I'm not saying it will--it will be because he didn't waste enough money, and didn't spend enough time being a condescending egghead. READ MORE >>

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It's been a month since Democrats swept the elections, right about the normal time for internecine warfare to break out. Last time the party won power, moderate deficit hawks and liberal neo-Keynesians immediately set out to wage a War for the Soul of the Clinton Presidency. Things got pretty vicious. There were no reported cases of knife wounds or tire-iron beatings, but furious memos exchanged hands, bitter memoirs were written by the losers, and medium- grade warfare simmered throughout the remainder of the decade at think tanks and magazines. READ MORE >>

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Earlier this summer, when the Obama campaign announced that Jason Furman was joining its staff as director of economic policy, the storyline seemed to write itself: Centrist adviser will pull Obama to the right. Furman had first made a name for himself as a wonky twentysomething wunderkind in the later years of the Clinton administration--a period when, to the consternation of many liberals, Clinton emphasized balanced budgets, free trade, and welfare reform. READ MORE >>

Let's say you want to criticize Nancy Pelosi from the left. That's right, the left--call her cohorts a bunch of squishy moderates; implore them not to be so damn timid. Where would you start? Iraq? Some antiwar types have attacked the Democrats for refusing to grow a pair and end the fiasco once and for all. But that's a tad unfair--congressional Dems are doing just about everything they can to wind down the war. What about impeachment? Pelosi has taken that off the table. READ MORE >>