David Dayen

As more becomes known about JPMorgan Chase’s Fail Whale trade, we learn that the Chief Investment Office, where the trades were placed, was the most dysfunctional trading desk this side of AIG’s Financial Products Unit. Early success turned it from an office that was supposed to be hedging risk into a profit center. And this [...]

The protests at the NATO summit in Chicago weren’t the only ones over the weekend. A group of about 1,000 bank accountability advocates drove to the front of Timothy Geithner’s house in Bethesda, Maryland, on Sunday, and tried to get an impromptu meeting with the Treasury Secretary. Nobody answered the door, however. “Wall Street crashed [...]

I’ve always thought the fear, ramped up by the Obama campaign, that shadowy interests would pummel them with advertising during the Presidential election, was unfounded. Shadowy interests may be shadowy, but they’re not stupid. They know the way to maximize their dollars, and it isn’t in the Presidential election. The top-line candidates are too well-known, [...]

Most of the leaders of the free world are meeting at the G8 Summit today at Camp David, and it sounds like the event has the look of an intervention where the other heads of state try to sit Angela Merkel down and convince her to reverse the austerity policies that are crushing European economies [...]

I’ve been on quite a few listservs in my career, including ones that were supposed to wield supreme influence. But I can assure you that I’ve never been involved with any listserv as effective as this. Basically, within 30 minutes of a story in Politico about how House Republicans may try to reinstate parts of [...]

The House has passed this year’s defense authorization bill which departs from last year’s debt limit deal by adding $8 billion above spending targets set for the military, and by replacing the defense side of the automatic “trigger” cuts with cuts from elsewhere in the budget. The final vote was 299-120, with 77 Democrats supporting [...]

Yesterday, Senate Republicans blocked yet another Iran sanctions bill on the grounds that they needed more time to study it and make sure it was sufficiently punitive. In fact, Republicans want the next sanctions bill to include an “explicit threat of a U.S. military strike if Iran refuses to curb its nuclear ambitions.” But while [...]

Simon Johnson writes that Timothy Geithner told Jamie Dimon to resign from the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. I saw the interview to which he’s referring, and I would hardly characterize it as that strong. First, let’s have Johnson give the particulars. This is the excerpt he gives from the interview [...]

Right now, talks are continuing on a House-Senate conference committee on the surface transportation bill, which provides federal funding, paid for mostly by the gas tax, to highway and mass transit projects across the country. Congress has kicked this bill down the road many times, and the House and Senate versions of the bill vary [...]

The chart above is from a Goldman Sachs analysis, and it shows the effect of fiscal policy on growth from 2009 to the present, as well as projections for growth in a variety of scenarios surrounding the fiscal cliff, the combination of expiring tax cuts and imminent spending cuts all set for the end of [...]

Alexis Tsipras of the front-running far-left Syriza party in Greece said that continuing on the current path of EU-enforced austerity would send the country to hell. His top rival, Antonis Samaras of the center-right New Democracy party, said that Greece risked a “nightmare” if they didn’t adhere to the agreed-upon reforms and found themselves outside [...]