As dead-armadillo-in-the-middle-of-the-road centrist, I’ve been really unimpressed with most of the conservative critiques of Barack Obama’s economic plans that I’ve seen. (Michael Boskin’s WSJ op-ed piece of a couple of days ago serves as a pretty good proxy for the lot of them.)

First, they tend to be inordinately alarmist about the …

They’ve put my story about Hank Paulson online, a day before the issue of TIME in which it appears comes out. Here’s how it begins:

It is late on a summer afternoon, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is sipping a Diet Coke in his giant corner office a patch away from the White House and doling out career advice. His secret to success?

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What I said on Monday was that how the private-equity shop KKR “stacks up in terms of influence over worker-lives” isn’t too shabby.

KKR had said it would go public—partly as a way to take over its struggling affiliate KKR Private Equity Investors (KPE)—and in the process, bragged that the 46 companies it has in its portfolio employ …

Regular readers of this blog were well-prepared for the news that GDP grew at an almost respectable 1.9% pace in the second quarter (or at least was estimated to grow at that pace on the basis of incomplete data and possibly suspect assumptions). But the really interesting information in the GDP release was that Q4 2007 growth was …

The always-thought-provoking Steve Randy Waldman, inspired by that Paul McCulley piece I cited last week on “the paradox of deleveraging,” writes:

Encouraging people to go shopping in order to help the economy is not “second best” policy. It’s a desperate last resort. We’re not at a point where there’s so little economic activity that we

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As recently as last fall, the mantra in the Bush administration was that the federal deficit, at 1.2% of GDP in FY 2007 and 1.9% in FY 2006, was smaller than the average of the previous 40 years. It was a true statement, although the choice of 40 years was interesting. If you’d gone with 60 years, or just the post World War II era, only …

Remember a few weeks ago when Justin spent some time playing with Fed data on home mortgage lending and made us this nice chart?

And he wrote:

The basic picture is pretty clear: Fannie and Freddie [i.e., GSEs, or government-sponsored enterprises] have dominated U.S. mortgage lending since the early 1980s—except from 2004 through

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Given the current slump in oil prices it’s a bit ill-timed, but the people at Clingendael, the Dutch equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations, have a new report out arguing that:

Until recently, the oil price was largely underpinned by the marginal cost of the last barrel needed to match demand, with some political and economic

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From the WSJ:

National restaurant chains Bennigan’s and Steak & Ale have closed their doors and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, shuttering more than 300 locations and letting go of thousands of employees.

It is one of the country’s largest restaurant bankruptcies and eliminates two sit-down chains that have been part of the

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A reader writes, in response to my column of a couple weeks back about the pre-Fannie-Freddie-bailout housing bill:

All this mumbo jumbo coming out of D.C. and the financial community is so much smoke screen. Don’t fall for it. Question EVERY single thing they say. Force them back to the basics.

For example, you reported that the

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The WSJ’s article about Kohlberg Kravis Roberts’s latest plan to go public points out that with a market value between $12 billion and $15 billion, the buyout shop would be worth more that Lehman Brothers and half the size of Merrill Lynch.

A few other numbers from KKR’s morning presentation caught my eye. With its portfolio of 46 …

The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 is headed for President Bush’s desk. He’s planning to sign it. Will it stop the housing crash in its tracks and avert recession? Probably not. Will it keep things from getting worse than they otherwise would? Probably. Is it full of lots of junk that won’t do much good at all? Almost …