More on privatizing Social Security

More on Social Security privatization from Henry Aaron at Brookings:
As American financial markets are hammered by a financial storm more frightening and more damaging than hurricane Ike, it is worth imagining what the world would have been like had president Bush’s Social Security proposal been enacted and been effective for a couple of decades. Of [...]

What Obama wanted

What Obama wanted to include in the candidates’ joint statement today.  A question I’d like to hear asked at Friday’s debate (assuming McCain shows up): Why did McCain reject those points, and what policy priorities would he have included instead?

My dog ate my economic plan

Slate’s John Dickerson via Twitter just now:
“McCain suspending campaign to handle econ.crisis. Debate prep. apparently not going that well. I tried this with papers in college but wow.”
This is still the real world and not some elaborate episode of Punk’d, right?

George Will vs. John McCain

I’m beginning to wonder if George Will is even going to vote in this election.
Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama. [...]
Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by [...]

The fallout

My professors are beginning to speculate about the effect of the Wall Street meltdown on the rest of the economics profession.  Econ professors (and grad students) are paid WAY more than their counterparts in other academic programs, because they have better outside options.  Make that: HAD better outside options.  If we go forward without those [...]

Socialized finance

From Howard Gleckman, over at TaxVox:
So, the Fed and the Bush Administration have now nationalized a $1 trillion company, just a few weeks after rescuing mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and a few months after bailing out Bear Stearns. I can’t help but wonder, who has nationalized more assets in the last six [...]

Paulson cancels Brookings appearance

A friend of mine has been organizing the event at Brookings today where Secretary Paulson was scheduled to speak.  It’s obviously been a crazy week, and to top it off, he just cancelled.  No time to talk while you’re saving the world… or watching helplessly as the economy collapses around you, as the case may [...]

But he hasn’t spoken with Keating since!

John McCain has a new ad out touting the “experience” he and Sarah Palin have that will help get us out of the giant–and rapidly growing–economic and financial mess we’re in.  But he doesn’t actually say what that experience includes, and he’s certainly never claimed to be an expert on the economy.  Joe Klein fills [...]

No more moral hazard

Thankfully, it appears there is a line:
After a marathon series of negotiations over the weekend, Federal Reserve and the Treasury stepped aside to allow a wrenching transformation of Wall Street to proceed. Having galloped to the rescue of other major financial institutions in recent months, the federal government drew the line with Lehman Brothers, ignoring [...]