Financial Transparency Coalition

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act--also known as the “financial overhaul bill,” or as Gary Becker put it a “complex, disorderly, politically motivated, and not-well-thought-out reaction to the financial crisis”--has passed the Senate. It’s now ready for the President to sign it into law. Economists across the board have offered opinions on the new legislation, including Gary Becker, who, as you can probably tell from the aforementioned quote, had a rather negative view of the legislation. Continue Reading

In October of last year I wrote about Roman Polanski, a sex offender turned movie director, who has lived in Europe since 1978 when he fled the United States (see: Confessions of a WaPo Reader). Swiss authorities took Polanski into custody last fall in Zurich and it looked as though European authorities might extradite Polanski to the United States. That October I argued that the arrest was a move to sooth U.S.-Swiss relations in the wake of the IRS inquiry into Switzerland’s largest bank, UBS. I noted it was a part of a growing trend toward accountability...

Two days ago, BP announced that it has (so far) spent $3 billion on cleanup and containment efforts in an attempt to mitigate the damage done by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon and the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And this is not including the $20 billion set aside to compensate business owners, fishermen, municipalities, and other parties who are suffering under catastrophic costs from spill-related damages. This monumental amount of money got me thinking about the Economics of oil spills. In particular, how does the financial liability associated with an oil...

This week, as U.S. families gathered to celebrate their nation's 234 years of Independence, headlines worldwide announced signs the global economic recovery is stalling or, perhaps, even reversing. The U.S. Labor Department reported that the world's largest economy added just 83,000 private sector jobs in June and overall the nation lost a total of 125,000 jobs, as the U.S. Census temporary workers exited their jobs. Other economic indicators boded ill as well, with auto sales rising a ho-hum 14% in June, sales of existing homes dropping 30% over the month of May, and consumer confidence slipping almost...