Jeff Madrick Jeff Madrick is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for The New York Times. He is currently editor of Challenge Magazine, visiting professor of humanities at The Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, The New School. He is the author of several books, including Taking America , and The End of Affluence , both of which were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Taking America was also chosen by Business Week as one of the ten best books of the year. He is also the author of Why Economies Grow . He has written for many other publications, including The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Institutional Investor, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Boston Globe, Newsday and the business, op-ed, and Sunday magazine sections of The New York Times. He has appeared on Charlie Rose, The Lehrer News Hour, Now With Bill Moyers, Frontline, CNN, BBC, CNBC, CBS, and NPR. He was formerly finance editor of Business Week and an NBC News reporter and commentator. His awards include an Emmy and a Page One Award. He was educated at New York University and Harvard University and is a fellow of the Century Foundation and The World Policy Institute, and a board member of Economists for Peace and Security. His latest book is The Case for Big Government . He is also working on a history of the U.S. economy since 1970, to be called The Age of Greed .

Did Obama’s economists do their homework on the Volcker rule?

Senator Chris Dodd is right to wonder, as he said yesterday, why the Obama administration waited so long to support something like the new “Volcker rule” — and then throw it into the mix to complicate the legislation. But that’s not the biggest problem.

What is disturbing is how poorly the Volcker rule has been thought through. When first announced, it sounded like a worthy and needed step in the right direction, and a suggestion the Obama team was waking up to reality. But I also expected more sophisticated details to come.

So far, there are none. The main proposal is to separate…

Obama Bank Proposal a Beginning

The Obama proposal to rein in banks is overdue. That it required the wake up call in Massachusetts Tuesday is unfortunate. It again leaves the Obama team appearing to be behind, not ahead, of the issues. Many well-informed and well-intentioned analysts, not just Paul Volcker, have been advocating a similar paring down of bank activities– a modern Glass Steagall – for a long time. We should all eagerly await the details of how it will work. But at first glance, the proposals appear to be well thought out. Savers’ deposits, insured by the federal government, cannot be put on the…

Wall Street bankers offer flimsy excuses at FCIC hearing

Jeff Madrick argues that the ‘bad judgment’ excuse doesn’t cut it when millions of Americans have been conned and defrauded.

“Panel rips Wall Street titans,” said the WSJ headline. Hardly. The Times was closer to the mark: “Few burns for four bankers…”

The Wall Street bankers know very well how to defend themselves. It was all a matter of bad judgment, they said. And they know you can’t be held responsible for that, legally or even (arguably) ethically. Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs admitted they had “rationalized” about some of their products. Rationalizing does not make you culpable. “If you’re going to do…

To Bankers and Regulators: Why the risky business?

Roosevelt Institute fellow Jeff Madrick poses tough questions to bankers and regulators on the irresponsible practices that helped sink the economy.

The Angelides Commission should focus on why the financial institutions represented took excessive risk. The questions should be designed to enable Americans to understand how this occurred. Here is what we should know.

To the bankers and regulators:

Many of your commercial and investment banks had their own mortgage-originating subsidiaries — their own Countrywides and New Centurys, in other words. Citigroup, for example, was almost as active as Countrywide in writing subprime mortgages through its subsidiaries. Merrill bought a big originator as…

New Agenda for America: Emergency Checklist

To mark the 80th Anniversary of the Great Crash of ‘29, we asked 15 progressive thinkers to write about lessons learned and what lies ahead. Together, their reflections constitute a New Agenda for America — a message of how the ideals of a fair society should apply to the economic and social policies of our time.

We have lost a generation in America to a simple ideology that government is at best a necessary evil whose influence is to be minimized. Going forward, there is much to do: reform healthcare; re-regulate finance; build a universal pre-k system; build a light rail and…

Money for Nothing

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Jeff Madrick explains how giant profits on Wall Street are not justified by contributions big firms make to the economy–and why it matters. This article appeared first in The Nation.

Quite a media hullabaloo was raised when the New York Times reported a week ago that Citigroup’s head energy trader, Andrew Hall, was possibly collecting a $100 million bonus for the profits his group earned in 2008–most if probably not all of it made trading on the price of oil. Hall is one of those independent-minded, nervy traders who generate enormous profits when they are right. Remember, the price of…

Full investigation of crisis is vital to democracy

How do we get the facts on how the financial system imploded? Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Jeff Madrick would prefer a special prosecutor —  or at least a special investigator — to a  meaningless bi-partisan hearing.

By now it’s clear that there should be a serious philosophical and open debate about how to regulate our financial institutions. Remarkably, we have had none. The Obama adminsitration’s deliberations have been behind closed doors, most likely dominated by bankers. It is imperative that the nation have a broader, deeper, more varied, and, if necessary, controversial discussion. The only way to do this is through a…

Obama’s regulation proposals work — except for all those major parts that don’t

What works in the Obama’s new regulatory proposal is overshadowed by what doesn’t–and what isn’t there at all. Jeff Madrick dissects the plan’s weaknesses.

Wall Street has been a runaway train for years now. I didn’t fully appreciate what was happening on Wall Street myself until I started reading some of the good recent books on the subject, the good stuff of which was largely extracted from Justice Department or Securities and Exchange Commission complaints. 

But the proposed Obama administration regulations won’t be not enough to slow the runaway train down or even keep it on the track. The Obama administration seems determined…

On the road to recovery, don’t drive too fast

Many are now arguing that the economy will soon bottom out. Indeed, it’s fast becoming the consensus view. There are some serious obstacles, needless to say, but the reason we can talk about recovery at all is because the government took strong action: An aggressive Federal Reserve policy, coupled with the Obama stimulus; some housing adjustment plan; and the ongoing bank rescue package, disappointing as it may be.

But now there is a danger. Some will argue that things weren’t all that bad to begin with and government overspent and overplayed. “We never needed the government spending in the first place,”…

Call for a New Social Contract with America

Jeff Madrick calls for an end to Friedman-fantasies and a robust government role in rebuilding America.

The social contract of the past thirty years, it is now clear, was based on a serious misconception about the state of the American economy. The financial crisis has now shown that the excessive creation of debt was a major propellant of economic growth. America did not have the new and improved economy so many Republicans and Democrats, not to mention mainstream economists, told us we had.

Because of their mistaken confidence in an unlimited growth potential for the economy, some believed the social contract based…