J'accuse! "He allowed the illegal creation of Citigroup with a nod and a wink, knowing that Gramm-Leach-Bliley was just around the corner and would make Citigroup legal in retrospect. He then collected his just rewards in the form of $126 million in pay from Citi, for a job which even Weisberg admits involved no managerial responsibility." Plus, all the stuff about derivative regulation. May I add that if I am ever appointed treasury secretary, I would be willing to engage in comparable acts for a mere $20 million (in 2010 dollars)?

I was unfortunately drinking coffee when I read this line: "hard-driving captains of industry are not putting down cash on some vague promise of overturning Roe. Apparently, rich Republicans won't cough up the big bucks until they actually see women in bondage."

I especially look forward to reading the bits about Larry Summers.

This really looks very bad. (And: a journal refusing to share referee reports with someone listed on the MS. as an author? WTF?)

Merck paid Elsevier to gin up a mock peer reviewed journal pushing Merck's drugs. I have already given up on providing free labor to Elsevier in the form of refereeing, but now I am contemplating deliberately avoiding citing papers which appear in their journals.

Barry Eichengreen on what is (and what is not) wrong with economics.

... is being shaken down by the police.

Published version, via JSTOR. (The discussants seem clueless.)

Italian politics since the mid 1990s, especially Berlusconi.

The end of Swiss banking as we knew it.

While substantially disgusted, I do have to admire the elegance of the racket: first as judges you shut down the public juvie detention as unsafe, then you sentence every kid possible to the private jail which just so happens to have opened up, and which just so happens to be paying you millions.

The confession of his own fraud is interesting. The core proposal (underneath the failure to write clearly) is that selectively prosecuting frauds after they happen is less effective than a regulatory compliance regime that makes fraud hard to commit in the first place. This is fair enough, but (as Tanta used to say), there is no way to actually verify the claims in mortgage applications & c. _quickly_. Requiring it would lead to massive changes in an industry which has rebuilt itself around speedy securitization. This may or may not be a bad thing.

I don't know that the magnitude of derivatives matters so much as he makes out, if only because so many of them have bets going the other way that the net effect is much smaller. (But uncertainty about what that net position is, on the other hand...)

Krugman's long-form take on what Obama should do, domestically, in year 1. Where do I sign up to help pressure Obama to do all this?

(And, in a "why oh why can't have a better press" moment, why does our leading public intellectual have to publish this in Rolling Stone, of all places?)

Draft inspector general's report on the Iraqi reconstruction project. I've not finished it yet, but: Unbefuckinglievable.

"We now have data claiming that there is no difference in the quality of controlled clinical weight loss trials whether they are funded by industry or independently. The senior author on this comparative study is the very same person who was relieved of his responsibilities as head of a national obesity society because he wrote a letter opposing calorie labeling without disclosing that he was paid to do it".

It's a wonder the WSJ editorial page doesn't explode from sheer cognitive dissonance.

Aaron explains one reason why we don't, in fact, have a better press corps: the threat of being sued for things like "breach of loyalty" [!]

Why yes. Yes he did.

I love the smell of bilking struggling school districts; it is the smell of alpha.

Good riddance; assuming, that is, that the program doesn't just start up again with a different acronym on a different budget (cf. Total Information Awareness)

Loud and prolonged applause.

Lessig contemplates a Congressional run on a good-government platform.

"How a top Pentagon official and a host of influential Republicans almost made sure that one American company gained a key stake in Iraq's lucrative wireless market." Ahhh, 2004.