Robert Reich: The latest jobs bill coming out of Washington isn’t really a bill at all. It’s the Fed’s attempt to keep long-term interest rates low by pumping even more money into the economy (“quantiative easing” in Fed-speak).
Wall Street’s Global Race to the Bottom
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Robert Reich: So the race to the bottom is now official. Wall Street will set up its casino wherever financial gambling is least regulated.
Why No Amount of Fiscal or Monetary Stimulus Will Be Enough
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Robert Reich: The Fed’s decision Tuesday to keep short-term interest rates near zero is no surprise. What’s odd is its apparent decision not to boost the economy by buying hundreds of billions of bonds — despite its acknowledgment that ”the pace of recovery in output and employment has slowed in recent months,” and that prices are rising too slowly for comfort (i.e., we might be facing deflation).
Why There’s An Enthusiasm Gap: An Illustration
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Robert Reich: Super-rich financiers on Wall Street and top corporate executives have grown richer, though most Americans are getting poorer.
Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Herbert Hoover
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Robert Reich: Both Greenspan and Rubin are deficit hawks. So was Herbert Hoover and so was Hoover’s Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. And look what Hoover and Mellon got us into. When we least need him, Hoover is being exhumed.
How the U.S. Empire Contributed to the Economic Crisis
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A few—and only a few—prescient commentators have questioned whether the U.S. can sustain its informal global empire in the wake of the most severe economic crisis since World War II. And the simultaneous quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan are leading more and more opinion leaders and taxpayers to this question. But the U.S. Empire helped [...]
Near Insanity at the Federal Reserve
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The latest economic news isn’t pretty. Price inflation is raging everywhere, yet in most housing markets, sales are weak and prices are still in near free-fall. Crude oil and gasoline prices are at record levels and still climbing, despite my recent prediction that oil prices would fall (be patient, they will).
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