RollingStone.com: Matt Taibbi | Taibblog Sat 2010-08-07 21:06 EDT

Are We In a Recession or Not? [Summers versus Romer]

Matt Taibbi

...Obama's economic team...has seen two fairly major resignations...[Council of Economic Advisers chairwoman Christina Romer] and budget director Pete Orszag...neither of them got along with Larry Summers...Most of the DC chatter class seems to have interpreted the dual resignations as a sign of the ascendant power of the Summers-Geithner axis within the Obama White House...Romer was the Obama administration official who was loudest in her advocacy of a much bigger stimulus, with the idea that the administration's economic strategy should have been based around creating jobs and shaving unemployment as quickly as possible...she was really the only person close to Obama's economic inner circle who isn't a former Clintonite or Rubinite and isn't either a former Wall Street banker or, like Geithner, a public-sector tool of Wall Street...Not that Christina Romer was a savior...but she was at least not completely a Wall Street pod job -- she was pretty much the last inner-circle adviser who wasn't, and now she's gone...

com; Matt Taibbi; Recession; rollingstone; Summers versus Romer; Taibblog.

Taibblog Sun 2009-09-20 09:51 EDT

Will Obama listen to ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker's warnings?

Matt Taibbi

So former Fed chief Paul Volcker yesterday was spouting off about how nuts it is that certain ``too big to fail'' commercial banks that receive mountains of public money are allowed to run around acting like high-risk hedge funds...This would be meaningful if the Economic Recovery Board that Volcker runs for Obama were actually a chief policymaking center for the president. But the reality is that the Volcker group is a kind of show-pony the Obama administration kept on as a way to give consolation jobs to the more progressive economic advisers who led them through the campaign season, people like University of Chicago professor Austan Goolsbee...Obama did a bit of a bait-and-switch, hiring progressives to run his campaign and jettisoning them once he got into office. I hear about this phenomenon from different corners of the policymaking universe, from health care to defense and intelligence spending. But my sense is that the switch was most violent in the realm of economic policy...

ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker's warnings; Obama listen; Taibblog.

Tue 2009-06-16 00:00 EDT

AlterNet: Obama's Top Economic Adviser Is Greedy and Highly Compromised

by Matt Taibbi; bribing Larry Summers

AlterNet; Greedy; Highly Compromised; Obama s top economics adviser.