Barack Meet Paul

Please, President Obama, do the following:

1) Call up Paul Volcker
2) Apologize for appointing him to the NEC and promptly burying him
3) Ask him politely to breath some fire, publicly, on your behalf
4) Use the threat of him at Treasury as a bargaining chip in financial reform
5) Call up Paul Volcker
6) Thank Paul Volcker

This is absurd. The entire financial services industry (in this I include banks, broker/dealers and insurance companies) are absurd. Financial innovation is absurd. Leave the risk taking to the appropriate risk takers (PE, VC and HFs) and make the banks into utilities. Investment banks should be kept out of the retail banking business and have no access to federal subsidies (Discount Window, TALF or any other alphabet soup).

Let Volcker loose.

Ben Nelson's Reign of Idiocy

To paraphrase Atrios, "We are all war bonds now." These people are such idiots. We finance everything through bonds. If you want to finance the war through a separate mechanism that won't expand the debt, you have to introduce something like David Obey's "War Tax."