Salmon, Drum, and Avent on the Fed and Regulation

Speaking of...

Here is a great post on regulatory consolidation within the Fed.

'Depressing in its innanity'

Krugman gets the tone just write...

'The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option — not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson — have offered no coherent arguments against it.'

And that's a great point. There haven't been any coherent arguments against the public option, just that it's politically unfeasible, and that it might be popular and successful.

He also makes a subsequent point about financial regulation...

There’s a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came....

Efforts to strengthen bank regulation appear to be losing steam, as opponents of reform declare that more regulation would lead to less financial innovation — this just months after the wonders of innovation brought our financial system to the edge of collapse, a collapse that was averted only with huge infusions of taxpayer funds.

Krugman suggests that it's the money talking on both health-insurance and financial reforms...

Part of the answer is that there’s a lot of money behind them. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary” — or, I would add, his campaign contributions — “depend upon his not understanding it.”