Why can't I have a law or two? The keys to what you say are "short term" threats of inflation, and that you frame the problem as risk/cost to the feds, not as risk to citizens as taxpayers and as economic actors.

Views of economic history are largely self-fulfilling prophecies. We're now in a "Keynsian" period of increased "liquidity" (ie pumping money with unrealized value into the economy) which must be followed by "expansion" or tight monetary policy (ie value increases and/or money supply decrease in growth). Keynes is the father of Friedman is the father of Keynes and so on.

Who am I to wake anyone from these dogmatic slumbers?

I'm simply arguing that cycles can be moderated by increasing value and liquidity at the same time, and that cap and trade represents a colossal opportunity to do so. Here is an opportunity for the government to create economic value by creating fiat scarcity (and not incidently encouraging technological innovation). Environmental liability is economic opportunity. Lind fundamentally misunderstands cap and trade as a cost added program. Actually, the government-directed research he suggests is the cost added program. Cap and trade can GIVE average people the value to meet higher environmental standards.

What Obama could learn from FDR, and what would make cap and trade clearer to Lind, AND what would provide better stimulus than the, um, So-Called Stimulus, is if the environmental credits were distributed to the lowest-level economic actors. People could conserve gas and make money at the same time, and then put that money in a bank that they think is half-way likely to survive the next couple of weeks, increasing the amount that bank could loan, etc.

The tired old debate between Keynes-Friedman approaches ignores that cap and trade is both and neither. A well-maintained and regulated cap and trade system can be an antidote to they cyclicism that results from our aging, brain-dead, incurious economists and politicians.

The President is always ahead of the curve, most lately offering 2 billion for more paramilitary, um, I mean cops.

Message to the hordes looking for housing: "Could I interest you in prison?"

He's starting to sound like Viggo in The Road.

I love starting rumors for our fundamentalist friends.

Maybe Sirota needs to put Louis Armstrong on the ipod and go for a walk.

Not that things aren't bad. But, I'm reminded of something a leader in a slum told me once: "the poor can't afford pessimism."

Or, in the words of an old hymn: "Always look on the bright side of life."

Or maybe that was Monty Python. Whatever.

Some of us have long warned about exactly these regulatory weaknesses in Clintonian elite globalization.

But, I am not really worried now about regulatory hurdles in "nationalizing" citibank. There'll be a cluster-f of powerful elites ready to grab choice bits--at taxpayer expense.

The problem with the nationalism model may not be that it is socialism, but that it is socialism for the wealthy. Enormous liabilities are being passed on to future generations and taxpayers for the benefit of few. Is it so wrong to ask whether there may be other options?

We're warned again and again about "global financial collapse" if we do "nothing." I think we, and particularly the left, needs to more carefully examine what will collapse, how it will collapse, ask whether any other models/banks supplant what collapses, and wether there are better paths to working, and more fair, global banking system. We are spending enormous resources toward propping up the old regime. Might we better spend these resources toward a new way of doing business?

I say that as a believer in markets, by the way.

Midwestern automakers would be better off today if federal regulators had allowed California to raise fuel standards a decade ago. Unfortunately, government economists stifled technological innovation and a diversity of capacity by arguing for the efficiency of a single, and inevitably lower, national standard. Car makers did not have the diverse fleet of base vehicles needed to evolve in a changed market place. Now taxpayers are handing money to the automobile barons. It's the thing these days to blame the carmakers, and we should. But we would be dumb not to look at the whole picture of how this sorry state came about.

The economists failed by not considering long, or even medium-term, variables in their cost-benefit analysis

Economists now tell us to bail out the banks, when the incorrect regulatory/globalization structure they themselves argued for is largely responsible for the banks' failure. What bothers me is that we are continuing to blindly trust exactly the same economists/politicians who are now desparately trying to keep the bogus system they made running day to day with public cash infusions. Once again, the cost-benefit they are performing seems myopic.

Who is looking toward the long term in the banking crisis? Where do we want to be two years or five years from now?

Pandit Pandit and Spanky Bernanke are like an old time vaudeville act. Can you blame Wall Street for cheering? It's like telling jokes at an AA meeting after someone spikes the perc with bourbon. Given the audience, everything seems funny.

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But this regulation is full of loopholes, Spanky!

I told you it would be hole-istic!

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What happened, Pandit Pandit? Your memo was full of profit this and profit that!

It WAS full of profit, but it LEAKED!

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Ha. Ha ha. Hey guys, if Citigroup has been so profitable, why are we taxpayers giving them our money?

Guess the joke is on us.