Category: Bank Tax

A couple days ago we had a piece up on National Review Online.  Professor Arnold Kling and Nicole Gelinas  both comented on it.Â
Mr. Kling was off to such a great start, and then without warning he’s just gone plain silly.
Some of his confusion is unsurprising. Everyone, but everyone who comments on the crisis seems to [...]

This Sunday, New York Times Magazine is publishing a story titled: HEADING OFF THE NEXT FINANCIAL CRISIS (Hat tip Mike Allen at Politico). In the piece New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt looks at the idea of preventing the next financial crisis, or at least making it less damaging. He includes a conversation he [...]

The whitewash of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has to be numbered among the most successful spin operations of our time. Within days of the market collapse in September ‘08, both Senator Dodd and Representative Frank were marching stooges up to Capitol Hill to testify that Fannie and Freddie—virtually run by the congressional committees chaired [...]

Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante column that appeared on RealClearMarkets.

Commentary By Capitalism Betrayed’s Redleaf and Vigilante in MarketWatch today:
Forget regulation, just make the banks open their books.
By Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante
MINNEAPOLIS, (MarketWatch) — Sen. Dodd’s new and not-very-improved financial reform bill, like the House bill passed last December, is driven by two of the most cherished popular myths of the financial crisis. [...]

As readers of Panic know we are big fans of AEI scholar Peter Wallison so we were thrilled to get his reply to our post yesterday (which you can find below.)
Richard and Andy,
I was delighted that you saw the distinction I have been trying to make between creditors and managements. Too many in Congress and [...]

The Brits let the cat out of Obama’s bag. How quickly the  they have dropped the pretense that the bank tax is about anything but raising money from a politically unpopular group. We especially love the quote from PM Brown who argues a bank tax is necessary to make sure the “contribution banks make to [...]

Great stuff at Keith Hennessey.com
A friend recently alerted us to Keith Hennessey’s blog, which he pitches as “your guide to America’s economic policy”. And quite the guide it is, full of myth-busting facts, charts, and graphs like this terrific piece contrasting the Bush and Obama deficits. (Doesn’t alter our rating of Bush as worst President [...]