David Dayen

As I mentioned on Sunday, the Greek Parliament agreed to a bailout deal that exchanges funds from Europe for new austerity measures that will sink the economy even further. Via David Atkins, Talos has some of the specifics of what this will entail for the Greek people: Greece is already a “labor wasteland” where jobs [...]

I’m loath to dive into the numbers of the Administration’s FY 2013 budget, because it won’t be used as anyone’s baseline, and to the extent that it will, that was baked into the cake by the debt limit deal. If you want the hard numbers, the surprisingly best source I’ve found comes from the Guardian. [...]

Car bomb attacks on workers at two Israeli embassies in India and Georgia could help provide a pretext for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israel immediately blamed Iran and Hezbollah for the attacks, which occurred overnight. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. But if the Israeli accusations are verified they would represent [...]

Lots of people were angered by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s announcement that he would use money gained from the foreclosure fraud settlement to plug his budget hole. I suspected that a lot of states with a budget gap would go this route. And that apparently includes Missouri, a state with a Democratic Governor and a [...]

The FY 2013 budget that the Administration will release today is, in the long run, a meaningless document in substantive terms, so I don’t want to spend that much time on it. But I was a little surprised with the pushback I received about my assessment that it reflects a shift in tone rather than [...]

If Pimco, the giant bond fund, actually believes this, they can sue to block the foreclosure fraud settlement. But of course, nobody has seen terms, which would be kind of crucial to that circumstance: The government’s deal with banks over their foreclosure practices after 16 months of investigations is cheap for the loan servicers while [...]

2.12.12. Here’s a binary code roundup. (in the sense that there are only two numbers in the date, I recognize it’s not a true binary code date like 10.11.11 or 1.10.01) • Good commentary on the foreclosure fraud settlement from Michael Hiltzik, Gretchen Morgenson and former US Rep. Patrick Murphy. Meanwhile, it’s day four since [...]

Amid general strikes and riots in Athens, the Greek Parliament has a late-night vote on new austerity measures that are seen in European capitals as a prerequisite to the release of bailout funds for Greece. Expectations are high that Parliament will accept the bailout deal, which includes a number of additional austerity programs. The vote [...]

Noam Scheiber has an excerpt of his new book on Obama’s economic policy in The New Republic. It focuses on 2011 and the series of bruising negotiations with Republicans over the deficit. And it includes the now-familiar internal White House struggles between deficit reduction and economic stimulus, with deficit reduction winning out through 2010 and [...]

Because there’s no actual term sheet for the foreclosure fraud deal it’s virtually impossible to assess it, and every group who released a press statement calling it “a drop in the bucket” or a “down payment” or a “first step” should withdraw before the facts are known. But we should be talking about how the [...]

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops have now either reversed field from their previous reaction to the Obama Administration’s birth control accommodation policy announced yesterday, or they’re in negotiation mode. That’s what we can make of their latest missive, laden with unnecessary bold-facing, on the birth control access issue. The bishops made it fairly clear [...]