Last Sunday, my son asked me what I thought about the WaPo article “Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tackles five myths about TARP.” Here’s my reply.

There’s a lot of truth to the specifics, but his overall evaluation is way off because he looks at it by cherry-picking specific points, and also restricting his evaluation to the bank situation alone, and assuming that the proper goal was to save the big banks at low cost rather than to save the economy. So here are things the Administration and Geithner could have done if they had ended TARP and taken a different course.

The September jobs report is out: The private sector gained 64,000 jobs in September…  The public sector lost 159,000. And they weren’t all census jobs, either. Local governments fired 76,000 workers. In other words, this is the first jobs report in recent months that isn’t driven by census layoffs. If there were no census jobs [...]

Nobel prize winner Joe Stieglitz recently called for a second stimulus to reduce unemployment and get the economy working well again. But the Administration seems uninterested in pushing the idea or making it an issue in the election, because it has been unsuccessful in setting the necessary frame for persuading the public that its first inadequate stimulus was only a political compromise that has done some good, but left much more yet to do. Yet we badly need that second stimulus, and if the Democrats could get their act together, get people back to work this month, and were willing to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate, we could have it quickly, and they probably could even avoid catastrophic losses in November.

“There will be no Arizona in Massachusetts!” echoed hundreds of revelers of all races, religious, ethnic and national backgrounds at the South End’s Titus Sparrow Park, the first major campaign rally for incumbent Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray.

We all remeber the tragedy that was the Gulf Oil Spill and the crippliong effects it had on the Gulf Coast economy. Recent actions taken by the administration against the energy sector are making things worse.

The White House just released a statement that the President’s Chief Economic Adviser, Larry Summers, will leave the Administration and return to Harvard University by the end of the year

President Barack Obama’s decision to appoint Elizabeth Warren to set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) couldn’t have come at a more critical time.

The Great Recession ended in June 2009, according to the body charged with dating when economic downturns begin and end.

More good news on the economic front: The percentage of Americans struggling below the poverty line in 2009 was the highest it has been in 15 years, the Census Bureau reported Thursday, and interviews with poverty experts and aid groups said the increase appeared to be continuing this year. With the country in its worst [...]

The public is widely opposed to the idea of extending tax cuts for the rich. One wouldn’t know this, however, from listening to Republicans in the media who frame the public as conservative on economic issues.