Category Archive

The employees at AIG's Financial Products division — the very unit whose trading had hastened the insurance giant's collapse and help send the U.S. economy in a downward spiral — have absolutely no sense of humility. Having done, by all accounts, the worst possible job they could possibly do, these clowns are still getting about $100 million, the last installment of … Read More

Unemploymet holds steady at 9.7, which is good news in the sense that many feared it would get worse last month.  Here's the job losses per month since the start of this recession

The suffering of hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans eased last night as Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) finally stopped blocking legislation temporarily extending unemployment and COBRA benefits, which stopped on Sunday. The New York Times reports: It came after Mr. Bunning’s fellow Republicans began to air their own concerns about how the Senate blockade had the potential to damage their political brand … Read More

Republicans, including the Scott Brown of Massachusetts, are claiming right and left that Obama's stimulus just didn't work.  (Brown is making the incredible claim that it didn't create "a single job"). David Leonhardt of the New York Times puts this meme to rest (not that it won't change the GOP message) in a thorough and compelling way: Just look at … Read More

From the Denver Post: COLORADO SPRINGS — This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric. More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping … Read More

From a Gallup poll released today:  Oy vey.  That's depressing  Dear 57%: The reason we are in the financial crisis today is because of government deregulation of business.  Republicans (and not a few Democrats) have subscribed to the montra that government is best left out of meddling in business, a theory disproven by the Great Depression and again these past few … Read More

That's the fastest growth since 2003, and has caused the AP to declare that it is "the strongest evidence to date that the worst recession since the 1930s ended last year." Of course, that's just one economic figure.  Unemployment remains high.  But it is a good sign in an economic world starkly devoid of good news.

Turnaround is fair play: President Obama proposed Thursday a sharp increase in the taxes paid by the nation's largest financial institutions that he said would raise at least $90 billion over the next decade while constraining the industry's ability to take large risks and to collect what he described as "obscene bonuses." The tax, which must be approved by Congress, … Read More

Conservatives have been going full force in blaming Obama for the exploding deficit.  And it's true, the stimulus package did mushroom the deficit. But the thing to remember is that Obama inherited a huge deficit from Bush and a crummy economy (the two are not necessarily the same).  And the stimulus spending, while adding to deficit woes, was necessary to … Read More

Michael Steele, GOP chairman in Politico: Over 2.8 million jobs have been lost since President Obama’s began to experiment with his deficit funded stimulus package. That's like saying that the house continued to burn even after the firemen showed up and opened their hoses on it; therefore, the firemen and the water are at fault. The truth is that the stimulus has … Read More