Crash Survival Zone

by Paul Krugman

Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 [...]

By Paul Krugman

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery. Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of [...]

by Michael R. Sesit

Can the Obama effect last?

The U.S. president-elect is so admired, engenders such high aspirations and is such a wellspring of hope that no one could meet these expectations. That’s bad news for financial markets.
Barack Obama is four days from entering the White House with more at stake than any president since Franklin [...]

Confronted with intense skepticism on Capitol Hill over the $700 billion financial rescue program, Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy F. Geithner and President-elect Barack Obama’s economic team are urgently overhauling the embattled initiative and broadening its scope well beyond Wall Street, sources familiar with the discussions said.

Geithner has been working night and day on the eighth [...]

President-elect Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package will include hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tax breaks for individuals and businesses, according to a transition official and Democratic aides.

Obama is asking that tax cuts make up 40 percent of a stimulus package, the people say. The measure may be worth as much as $775 billion, [...]

President-elect Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress will take over the government this month with big plans to overhaul U.S. financial regulation and a surge of momentum behind them.

From the mortgage meltdown to the Bernard Madoff scandal, the financial system is in crisis. Critics are hammering the federal bureaucrats who are supposed to manage the [...]

China and the United States should be kicking off 2009 with a celebration of three decades’ hard work building one of the world’s most crucial diplomatic relationships.

Instead the superpower and the rising power are fighting their way through an economic crisis that may be the biggest strain yet on the web of ties they have [...]

Democratic lawmakers want to pass a far-reaching bill to save the economy by Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.

That’s the goal.

But the reality may be a little different. Enactment of an economic stimulus bill could be pushed into late January or early February, said Dan Clifton, a Washington-based analyst with the investment research firm Strategas Research [...]

I have had a ringside seat to the economic downturn this year. It is not an abstraction to me. The folks at the bottom are always the first to feel the pinch, when it comes. Clients of the agency I work at come through our doors every day requesting assistance with basic necessities like food, [...]

by Thomas Friedman

…A gas tax reduces gasoline demand and keeps dollars in America, dries up funding for terrorists and reduces the clout of Iran and Russia at a time when Obama will be looking for greater leverage against petro-dictatorships. It reduces our current account deficit, which strengthens the dollar. It reduces U.S. carbon emissions driving [...]