Chavez rounds up the bankers

Barack Obama could learn a lot from Hugo Chavez - at least in how to deal with the bankers. Maybe if we would follow his example, we could finally break the "Wall Street-Treasury Complex" and prevent the ridiculous lobbying by the financial industry.

BIS targets wrong people....

Apparently the BIS is worried about China's loosening of monetary policy potentially creating systemic risk.

That's all well and good, except for the fact that (a) the economy is still growing rapidly, (b) China's growth is fueled by exports, so an international investment glut is unlikely, to say the least, and most importantly (c) large lenders in China are maintaining Capital Adequacy ratios over 11 per cent.

When the banks collapsed in the Asian crisis of 1997-8, capital adequacy ratios were a mere 2-3%. In fact, standard provisioning under Basel II still runs in the 4% range. So, financial collapse, especially now that the major crisis has stabilized and international regulations are (hopefully) tightening, seems unlikely to say the least - especially in an economy where growth is NOT fueled by speculative bubbles. In short, China's looser monetary policy is far more constrained than the US and EUs policies, and backed by a much more solidly growing economy.

Dear BIS, please stop picking on the developing world, and start paying attention to the speculative financial markets fueling the current crisis - the ones in the US and EU!

Proposed Financial Transactions Tax is...

The single best idea for preventing another financial crisis and ensuring job growth in the middle class.

See the proposal here: http://www.defazio.house.gov/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=532

Justifications can be found here (the PDF file is especially useful; other links indicate broad-based support).

Right to Life and Universal Health Care

If you read the headlines on the health care debate, you know that the most recent excuse to oppose a public option is that it might fund abortions. Understandably, this is opposed by most right-to-life advocates. What is ironic is that many right-to-life advocates also oppose universal care on grounds of cost or socialism. After all, the right to life also provides the strongest case for the health care package as a whole!

If you find yourself opposed to universal coverage, especially if you are an advocate of the right to life, ask yourself this: is it any more "moral" for a premature infant to die because her parents don't have insurance and couldn't afford proper postnatal care? What about a four year old boy with leukemia - do worries about US debt levels trump his right to live? Are our capitalist ideals more important than making sure a baby girl with pneumonia continues to breathe?

It is time we realized that we can't have it both ways. Either we support a right to life, in which case we support universal coverage, enforced by a public option - or we don't support a right to life at all.

I'm Sorry, But Iran's Election is Not a Fraud.

Here's some evidence:

See this op-ed from CEPR.

See this survey reported in the Washington Post.

See this expert opinion, and this explanation of why American "Iran experts" are misguided.

None of this means that the protests are unimportant, but it does mean that we should think before uncritically accepting media "experts" reports as the truth.