Well, Rick Perry entered the Presidential race with a splash. He spent the day in Iowa questioning Barack Obama’s patriotism, asserting that the military could only respect a veteran as their commander-in-chief and threatening Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke: Texas Governor Rick Perry, who entered the presidential campaign on Saturday, appeared to suggest a violent [...]

Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, according to this Washington Post story, can only say “aw, shucks” and stand in the middle of the street with their pocket turned out when the economy suffers blow after blow. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, Bernanke was a relatively new Fed chairman, and Geithner was his chief [...]

UPDATE: Stocks soared late in the session, and 10-year Treasuries continued to go down. So the two-day total for the “effect” of S&P’s downgrade is: less than 1% loss in the Dow, and US debt yields crashing. They’re geniuses! Meanwhile, the economy still sucks and the Fed refuses to do anything about it. Why did [...]

So Congress has done what it’s good at, unsatisfying deals completely unconnected to the real problems and challenges the country faces. And stocks are down 140 points on the news, after falling yesterday. It’s almost as if Wall Street doesn’t think too much of this deal! Maybe they’re using the same keywords as the rest [...]

The Federal Reserve is thinking about additional monetary easing aimed at boosting the economy, but the governing board is divided, according to Neil Irwin. Federal Reserve officials lack a strong consensus over what they should do next in setting the nation’s monetary policy, according to minutes of their last policy meeting, showing a mix of [...]

Before Democrats trotted out their “Republicans are sinking the economy” strategy yesterday, about the only elites willing to tell the truth about the effect of near-term spending cuts were Bill Gross and Ben Bernanke. In his now-regular press conference following the two-day FOMC meetings, Bernanke reiterated himself: I have advocated that the negotiations about the [...]

Ben Bernanke’s speech yesterday was half-honest. On the one hand, he said rightly that “a sharp fiscal consolidation focused on the very near term could be self-defeating if it were to undercut the still-fragile recovery.” My only quibble with that sentence is the word “could.” Simple math dictates that reducing overall demand in a time [...]

A couple weeks ago, we saw the enormous lobby culture massing around swipe fees, the relatively obscure issue that determines where billions of dollars go between banks and retailers. The important thing to start with is that this was already determined through a public process. Last year, Congress held a vote, Dick Durbin got over [...]

The business community is freaking out over the possibility of Republicans going back on their word and withholding an increase in the debt limit. Sixty-two trade associations signed an extraordinary letter to that effect today. Here’s an excerpt. Raising the statutory debt limit is critical to ensuring global investors’ confidence in the credit worthiness of [...]

Brad DeLong muses that Ben Bernanke has changed inflation expectations without anybody knowing it: I see no signs anywhere in the marketplace that there is any threat of rising inflation expectations. He stated that he was unwilling to undertake more stimulative policies because “it is not clear we can get substantial improvements in payrolls without [...]

I bugged out of the Ben Bernanke press conference shortly after he answered the crucial question. The questions were generally terrible, many of them dealing with things where Bernanke has no role whatsoever – gas prices (though he never mentioned over-speculation), fiscal policy and the deficit – and not the biggest problem facing the country, [...]