Break Up Big Banks

As usual, Simon Johnson has it right. Higher capital requirements are well and good, but big banks are inherently unsafe and need to be broken into smaller size. Banks that are too big to fail are also too big to exist.

Universities and Religion

Nothing is so sublime that it can't be bureaucratized.

The Second Great Contraction

This piece by Kenneth Rogoff, former IMF chief economist, now at Harvard, is excellent. He argues that calling the recent economic troubles a recession will tend to mislead us. He says that the proper name is the Second Great Contraction. If you think of pneumonia as just a really bad version of a cold, you won't treat it properly. I am not sure he is right about inflation being part of the cure, but he is, at minimum, framing the question properly.