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If I Ran the Zoo (Free subscription) | 29/11/2008
I usually think of Matt Yglesias as highly overrated but he simply nails this one : I’m fascinated by how common [Mark Steyn's whiny] depiction of American education is considering that it’s 100 percent false. No doubt there are bad history teachers and bad history classes in the United States, but anyone who’s vaguely in contact with reality can tell you that U.S. history is very much...
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9 Numbers (Free subscription) | 25/11/2008
Matt Yglesias offers up a solid line of reasoning: To that end, what’s the deal with banks that are too big to fail? If we can identify such banks, why not try to make a rule preventing banks from becoming that big? As a tradeoff, banks that rested in the small-enough-to-fail category could be allowed to operate [...]
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Kevin Drum - Mother Jones (Free subscription) | 11 hours ago
LEVERAGE.... Matt Yglesias approvingly notes something that Hank Paulson said today: We need to get to the place in this country where no institution is too big or too interconnected to fail. Hmmm. Is this even possible? Trying to regulate leverage is hard enough, but trying to directly regulate size and "interconnectedness"? Do we really want to do that? Take AIG, for example. Was the...
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faith in honest doubt (Free subscription) | 6 hours ago
Matt Yglesias observes one of the central perversities of American politics : [I]t’s worth noting how odd it is that the United States has the kind of highly ideological and deeply shortsighted business community. There’s no way a serious climate policy could be anything other than bad for oil companies and catastrophic for coal companies. But for most companies? Well, there shouldn’t...
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Brian Beutler (Free subscription) | yesterday
Here's the text of Hank Paulson's big speech today. There's some good stuff in there--but, of course, words only matter so much. As Matt Yglesias notes , it's perfectly fine to talk about keeping banks from becoming too big to fail, but ultimately useless (and puzzling) if in practice the bailout is, at least in part, a scheme to keep banks in business long enough to be purchased at...
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The Corner (Free subscription) | yesterday
Megan McArdle approvingly references Matt Yglesias's post on limiting CO2 emissions. She cites these key paragraphs: It's worth going back to first principles on markets, property rights, and air pollution. To have a functioning market, you need to have property rights. And property rights need to be defined in some way or other. This includes taking some view of the relationship between...
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Outside the Beltway (Free subscription) | yesterday
We’re about to see a great shift in resources from the military to other actors, David Sanger argues. In a New Atlanticist piece called “Obama’s Foreign Policy Shift,” I join Matt Yglesias in proclaiming this “a really good idea.”
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NYU Local (Free subscription) | yesterday
... continues to push the constant lies about the intelligence, which was not all “slam dunk.” And Matt Yglesias points out in a great post , “The administration deliberately went out of its way to re-write intelligence reports as less ambiguous than they really were — compare the classified and unclassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq — and to ignore reports...
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Unqualified Offerings (Free subscription) | yesterday
Matt Yglesias makes the essential point about Bill Kristol’s desire to send the Marines pirate-hunting: One might further note that the whole situation is a big unintended consequence of the Christmas 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. Something that was done with full US support and loudly cheered by The Weekly Standard. But thought he consequence was [...]
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The RBC (Free subscription) | yesterday
Megan McArdle puts it in a nutshell: There is no such thing as a free market approach to air quality or water rights. But, as Megan (quoting a Matt Yglesias post I can't find) point outs, some form of greenhouse gas tax or cap-and-trade system is as close as we're going to get. Since neither "no pollution" nor "unlimited pollution" is an optimum, some mechanism has to decide how much...
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Marginal Revolution (Free subscription) | 30/11/2008
Kevin Drum comments, here is Brad DeLong, and Matt Yglesias, and Arnold Kling; they make good points all around. There aren't nearly as many Cassandras as you think, once you require more of a person than "having called" the housing...
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TalkLeft (Free subscription) | 30/11/2008
Credit to Glenn Greenwald and Matt Yglesias for pointing to the latest NYTimes article that demonstrates that NBC and its empty headed, blow dried anchor Brian Williams have not a shred of integrity. See their posts and the Times articles for the details. But this is the bottom line about NBC specifically and the Media in general, from Yglesias: it's worth contemplating the breathtaking...
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faith in honest doubt (Free subscription) | 29/11/2008
Responding to Robert Rubin's self-serving claim that "nobody was prepared for" the collapse of Citigroup, Matt Yglesias makes a very salient point about these huge firms and the extremely well-paid people who run them: Presumably the reason the top executives at a giant financial services firm get paid such extravagant salaries is that it’s their job to be prepared for the stuff that...
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The Mahablog (Free subscription) | 29/11/2008
... process of government out the window in order to get the result you want is dangerous and foolish. Matt Yglesias writes , Part of the effort to pull the wagon of conservatism out of the ditch into which Bush piloted the country is going to be an effort to deny that George W. Bush was a real conservative. Going to be ? They’ve been reciting that line for at least a year. In reality,...
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Swampland (Free subscription) | 26/11/2008
Matt Yglesias thinks that the Obama transition has a different book from Doris Goodwin's Team of Rivals as its blueprint. Maybe so, but Obama sure does talk a lot about Lincoln and the Goodwin book. In any case, after one of the best run campaigns I've covered, this is now one of the best-run transitions. [...]
