South By North Strategies, Ltd.

The Recovery Act at Work

A Center on Budget & Policy Priorities analysis of poverty data for 2009 found that public policy supports contained in the recovery act kept 4.5 million Americans out of poverty.

Around The Dial – Jan. 10

Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:

• Bob Herbert notes how economic misery has ”plenty of company.”
• Free Exchange pulls together different explanations of the crisis.
• The New York Times wonders where the jobs are.
• The Baseline Scenario has a “Bill Daley problem.”
• The Wall St. Journal reports on the Obama administration’s next budget.

The Revolving Door

Felix Salmon looks at the “institutionalization of the revolving door” and finds its troubling.

It’s worth pushing back against this notion that earning a seven-figure sum on Wall Street automatically gives you a feel for markets and business — or even that in order to have a feel for markets and business, you have to earn a seven-figure sum on Wall Street. Neither is true. Advising Goldman Sachs on setting up a charitable foundation might teach people a lot about how to navigate the internal politics of Goldman Sachs, but that’s about it. And while there are certainly many highly-remunerated bankers who do know a lot about markets and business, there are equally many who don’t. Wall Street jobs tend to be hyper-specialized: a detailed knowledge of, say, the custody trail in reverse repo transactions is highly unlikely to give you any insight into the state of the US economy.
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As the testimony at the FCIC from the Goldman executives involved in the Abacus transaction shows, bankers tend to live in a highly distorted reality where the outrageous is accepted as a normal and ethical way of conducting business: insofar as working on Wall Street does give people a feel for how business is conducted, it can give people a very distorted impression indeed. Like, for instance, the impression that an annual income of $2.2 million is head-scratchingly low, rather than mind-blowingly high.

Analyzing The Dec. Jobs Report

The PBS NewsHour analyzes the December national employment report.

Around The Dial – Jan. 7

Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:

• Economix asks how private private charity is.
• Paul Krugman finds the stars not so bright in Texas.
• CBPP graphs the latest employment report.