Reading through Ben Bernanke’s speech today about “Financial Regulation and Financial Stability” is enough to give a person whiplash. One second he’s calling for actions to crack down on reckless lending. The next he’s calling for more reckless lending. He’s a good cop/bad cop partnership, all contained in one mild-mannered Fed chairman. First Bernanke announces [...]
In the last Presidential election, Texas-oilman-turned-corporate-raider-turned-alternative-energy-believer T. Boone Pickens plowed money into the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth—even offering to pay $1 million to anyone who could disprove a single claim from one of the group’s John-Kerry-bashing TV ads. This election cycle he’s attacking a different sort of record: America’s “addiction” to foreign oil. As [...]
Mark Thoma has a lengthy and meaty roundup of various appalled reactions to John McCain’s half-baked pledge to balance the budget by 2013. He points out that, in April: Sen. McCain … backed off his earlier promise to eliminate the budget deficit by the end of his first term and now says it may take [...]
