I just heard Ari Fleischer say this on the Daily Show: You can’t have a country that’s strong when you have 45% of the population not paying any income tax. Does this man know anything about the history of the income tax? No, obviously not. So let me share a fun fact from the Treasury [...]

Tonight at 9 p.m. CNBC will air a special called “The Nuclear Option,” which promises “to go inside the energy crisis.” The energy crisis? Holy crap, the financial crisis is on the back burner! CNBC is returning to our previously scheduled programming—this is great news. We don’t have to wait up all night waiting to [...]

On Monday Barack Obama unveiled a less-than-compelling list of new economic proposals to combat these economic hard times. Now John McCain has his own new list, dubbed the Pension and Family Security Plan. And guess what! His proposals may be even less compelling than Obama’s! The three McCain ideas I hadn’t heard before are: 1. [...]

At least it kind of seems that way. On October 6, the bond king wrote in his much-read investment outlook that the Federal Reserve should start buying commercial paper—short-term notes companies use to fund working capital. The next day, with the commercial paper market in full lock-down, the Fed said it would start a program [...]

Back in September, I wrote a story about how government-mandated restrictions on executive compensation don’t always work the way they’re meant to. Looking at the new rules for companies that sell equity to Treasury, I’m finding, for the most part, more of the same. Let’s go one by one: Any financial institution participating in the [...]

I mentioned in my post on Paul Krugman Monday that Greg Mankiw had told me years ago that he thought Krugman was a lock to win the Nobel one of these days. Greg said on his blog that he didn’t remember that, but it that sounded like something he would have said. Well, it turns [...]