wpcomimportuser1

I did a bunch of interviews for my Hank Paulson article that didn’t make it into the piece. One of the most interesting was with William L. Silber, the Marcus Nadler Professor of Finance and Economics at NYU’s Stern School. Silber is the author of When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins …

On Monday, July 28, my TIME colleague Michael Duffy and I paid a visit to the Treasury building in Washington to talk to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Parts of the interview made their way into my article in the current issue of the magazine. After the break, you can read some more parts. The interview was pretty long (just over an …

Dan Gross wonders about Wal-Mart’s latest clumsy effort to help the Republicans:

Wal-Mart’s brass plainly believes—no, know—that a Republican president would be good for Wal-Mart, while a Democrat would be bad. Despite Clinton’s Arkansas roots, most Wal-Mart executives probably opposed Clinton in both his successful campaigns. But

…

I figure I’ve blathered on enough about windfall profits taxes, so how about another proposal in Obama’s energy plan–selling oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?

There are 700 million barrels of oil in the SPR–enough to cover just over a month of current U.S. oil consumption, or two months of oil imports. The original …

Continuing on Monday’s windfall-profits-taxes-are-hard theme, here’s Australian economist Andrew Leigh (via Mark Thoma):

From an economic standpoint, the strongest argument for a windfall tax is that it has the potential to be non-distortionary. A one-off windfall tax levied on past profits should not change firms’ behaviour, since it

…

Barack Obama has renewed his call for a windfall profits tax on oil companies. A couple of months ago I said I was about to write something about windfall profits taxes. Never did. Why not? Because windfall- profits-tax opinion pieces are hard.

Actually, that’s not quite true. They’re pretty easy if you just focus, to the exclusion of …

Mark Zandi, the co-founder and chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, stopped by on Thursday afternoon. He was here to promote his new book, Financial Shock: A 360° Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis, and Barbara and I will get to that later. But he also moonlights as a John McCain …

Yeah, it’s from Newsweek, but this saga of driving a Hummer in LA is just too good not to link to:

After burning a gallon of gas every eight miles, our intrepid car reviewer Tara Weingarten and Business Editor David Jefferson stopped at an outdoor café in the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood, just down the block from an auto shop that

…

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?

…

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 …