To have a healthy economy we need healthy banks. We need the credit markets to work. We need loans to be available so that businesses can expand and hire more workers. It’s that simple. The current extraordinary and totally unproductive hyperventilation about banks and the supposed evils of the moneyed classes doesn’t get us very […]

The current crisis is not one that has shallow roots. The economy has had a series of imbalances for a long time. The deficit on foreign trade has been persistent for over a decade. The Federal deficit has ballooned during the last eight years. Domestic savings have fallen to unsustainable levels. And then, of course, […]

Now that the stimulus package has taken shape, and the Senate has acted on it, we can give a better assessment of its likely impact. My first reaction is huge disappointment. The debate that we all followed last week ended with a small group of Senators, the so-called ‘centrists’, cutting away some of the spending […]