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The Democrats are Moving Left, and the Real Work is Just Starting

Do Democrats running for office for the first time have their act together when it comes to economics? Writer Ryan Cooper is skeptical, writing at The Week that “The Democratic Party is flying blind on economics.

via The Democrats are Moving Left, and the Real Work is Just Starting

The biggest story no one is talking about is how the Bernie folks are
taking over the democratic party and the democratic party is letting them.

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Why Are There No Good Conservative Critiques of Trump’s Unified Government?

We are now 14 months into united conservative governance. Conservatives came into power with a clear plan to rip out Obama’s achievements and overhaul the whole modern state. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell planned on running everything through reconciliation. They also had a President who would sign anything. So how is it going?

via Why Are There No Good Conservative Critiques of Trump’s Unified Government?

Worth a read.

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Six Problems with the GOP Debate on Financial Reform – Roosevelt Institute

Six Problems with the GOP Debate on Financial Reform – Roosevelt Institute

Nobody Wants to Be a SIFI

Actually, institutions declared systemically important fight against it, hard. GE sold off GE Capital, and in the process its chairman said “GE will work closely with [regulators] to take the actions necessary to de-designate GE Capital as a Systemically Important Financial Institution.” They wanted out.

MetLife is suing the government because it was designated SIFI status. Carl Icahn is pushing AIG to break itself up to avoid its SIFI status. JP Morgan sold off 6 percent of its assets to prevent having the highest SIFI capital surcharge applied to them. The Too Big To Fail subsidy that is supposed to explain why people would want SIFI status has shrunk dramatically toward zero since the crisis. There is no bragging. There is solid resistance, as there should be.

The candidates funded by the hedge fund industry and the big banks wold be complaining about Financial reforms and The Volcker rule if it wasn’t a burden to their funders. Banks do not want to be tagged as a SIFI. The costs imposed on them are too great. They would much rather externalize their risks to others and ultimately the tax payers. Internalizing their risks it bad for bonus season.

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Two Contradictory Arguments That Dodd-Frank is Crony Capitalism | Next New Deal

Two Contradictory Arguments That Dodd-Frank is Crony Capitalism | Next New Deal

I’m pretty convinced that the term “crony capitalism,” as deployed by the right, is useless as a political or analytical tool. I keep a close eye on how conservatives talk about financial reform, and according to the right, Dodd-Frank is crony capitalism. Oh noes! But what does that mean, and how can we stop it? Here’s a fascinating case in point: two AEI scholars with different publications argue that we need to stop Dodd-Frank from enabling crony capitalism, and then proceed to describe two opposite, mutually exclusive sets of problems and solutions.

I missed this the first time around, but I’m glad I got a chance to read it. This is worth a read. There are a few words that are now meaningless in political discussion because they are used to mean different things, even contradictory things. Crony Capitalism joins Socialism as a term that means something I don’t like and has lost all other meaning.

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The Tea Party thinks it hates Wall Street. It doesn’t.

The Tea Party thinks it hates Wall Street. It doesn’t.

many Tea Party Republicans are in favor of the same bills favored by the financial industry. Take the Financial Takeover Repeal Act of 2013, a one-line bill sponsored by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) that repeals Dodd-Frank and replaces it with nothing. This bill has 22 co-sponsors this year, including notable Tea Party senators such Mike Lee, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.

The best way to explain the Tea Party and Wall Street is The enemy of my imaginary enemy is my imaginary friend. The Tea Party is in favor of imaginary Randian makers and opposed to imaginary Randian looters. Wall Street thinks the same. The only rift is who they imagine the looters and makers are. This is the problem with Randian thinking. 

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No, Marco Rubio, government did not cause the housing crisis

No, Marco Rubio, government did not cause the housing crisis

For obvious reasons, this argument is very popular on the right, but there’s precious little to back it up. The core claim can be a bit slippery, but it tends to go something like this: the existence and affordability goals of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSEs) and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) were a major reason we had a subprime-driven housing bubble and then a crash. The only problem? Pretty much all the evidence on the housing crisis shows that that’s not true.

worth a read.