Author: Norman Leahy

The open question on Wall Street, official Washington and plenty of households is whether the U.S. banking system has stabilized…or if more bad news is yet to come. The broad answer: no one knows for sure (and those who say they know for sure are talking their book). As Barry Ritholtz writes, there’s still a lot we don’t know about the institution that started all this, Silicon Valley Bank. And that means we know even less about the bigger financial sector picture: Over my three decades of surfing crises on Wall Street. The one unifying thread that connects all of…

The Biden administration’s budget plan is stuffed to the gills with new taxes intended to help pay for (some) of the new spending the president wants. While Mr. Biden’s budget is going nowhere, fast, it offers a teaching moment on how the current tax code taxes your money two or three times.  The Tax Foundation’s William McBride writes the president’s proposals would make an already deeply unfair, and economically suspect, tax code even worse. Among the offending ideas: Raising the top individual income tax rate to 39.6 percent, adding another 1.2 percent to the Medicare tax on wages, and expanding…

There’s plenty of fallout from the closure of (at least) two banks over the weekend and the government’s announcement it was guaranteeing all depositors’ money in those banks.  The bottom line: this was a bailout with all the risks, moral hazards and rewards for very bad behavior we were told would not happen again following the 2008 financial crisis. As The Wall Street Journal writes: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday there will be no “bailout” for [the now-closed Silicon Valley Bank], but she is indulging in semantics. The feds said they will guarantee even uninsured deposits at SVB as…

The Biden administration has gotten around to introducing its proposed federal budget. The immediate verdict: it’s dead on arrival in Congress (particularly in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives). That should come as no surprise to anyone, anywhere (including the White House). But as this budget is, like every one of its predecessors, Republican and Democrat alike, a political document, it tells us Mr. Biden’s priorities as he prepares to seek a second term. Among them are more social programs: The president’s budget proposed $400 billion to deliver affordable child care for parents, $150 billion for home care for older Americans…

There have been more stories about more authors whose works are being “sanitized” for the modern reader. Among the latest: Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, which, apparently, contain far too many problematic passages for today’s easily offended public. It’s not a new problem – sensitivity readers (none dare call them censors) have been wreaking havoc on authors’ works for some time. And it’s even applied to one of the most famous anti-censorship books of the last 100 years: Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.” A version of the book was censored to protect impressionable public school kids from dangerous ideas and phrases…in…

For the congressional budget writer looking for ways to trim federal spending while striking a blow for less intrusive government, one good place to start is that overstuffed warehouse of post-9/11 panic: the creepily named Department of Homeland Security. As Reason Magazine notes, the 20-year-old department has done very little to make anyone safer. And cost a lot — in both tax money and individual liberty — doing so: …critics of DHS noted from the start that it didn’t actually reduce bureaucracy or streamline much of anything. It just added a new layer of red tape on top of existing…

The list of issues confronting the political classes’ push to electrify more daily activities has run into several obstacles along the way. But if we look past the issues with materials, the rickety grid network, terrorism and the weather itself, what else could make the transition slower, and more costly, than advertised? A shortage of electricians. The Wall Street Journal reports: The scarcity is part of a nationwide labor shortage and most acute in the Northeast and California, where demand for green-energy products is highest, in part due to state incentives. Some economists expect the pinch to spread across the…

It’s no secret that relations between politicians and the press are particularly strained these days. It comes with the territory – the press and the powerful are supposed to have an adversarial relationship. The result, usually, is accountability – a definite public good. But public good is not what will result if a bill introduced in the Florida Senate gets any traction. Quite the opposite. Republican Sen. Jason Brodeur’s bill would violate basic First Amendment rights, punish small, independent reporters and protect the powerful, all at the same time. The bill would require bloggers who write about the state’s top…

It’s no secret that the accuracy of public opinion polls has suffered in recent years as more and more people refuse to participate. While that may make for some sleepless nights at various campaign headquarters, there’s another universe of polls that is also suffering a long-term decline in response rates: polls that inform government policy, things like unemployment rates, inflation and many, many more. As Bloomberg notes, declining response rates for polls like these could have real consequences: “The problem with the economic statistics is, we’re interested in magnitudes from very skewed distributions,” says Robert Groves, a former Census Bureau…

While the White House and Congress continue their discussions over what to do about the federal debt ceiling, there’s a parallel debate over when Uncle Sam might face a cash pinch – one so big and so critical it results in a default. To be clear: sovereign debt defaults are extraordinarily bad, and aside from a technical default in the 1970s, the U.S. has always made its interest payments on time and in full. But the dire consequences of a default has become a part of the discussion. Much of this is theater. But as this debate is happening in…