Congress last week tussled over which agency would supervise "Systemic Risk," but the idea is still not well-defined. Darryll Hendricks, a member of the new Pew Financial Reform Task Force, makes a good effort at this here. Which are the risks, and which are the systems that would be regulated or supervised? Are there ways to anticipate how investors would seek to evade systemic risk regulation? How should this new layer of government regulation interact with existing regulation of banks and other financial enterprises?
-- John Maggs, NationalJournal.com
Putting aside the question of whether or not President Obama is violating a campaign promise, assess Democratic proposals to raise taxes on high-income earners. Even without a health care reform, Obama would shift a higher burden of taxation on the top 1 or 2 percent of earners. Is this efficient? Is it fair? What will be the impact on recovery and growth?
-- John Maggs, NationalJournal.com
10 responses: Mark Bloomfield, Len Burman, Ryan Ellis, Rob Atkinson, Isabel Sawhill, Bruce Josten, J.D. Foster, Jeffrey Frankel, William Gale, Gerald Prante
The savings rate, which averaged less than 1 percent from 2005 to 2008 and 1.5 percent for the last decade, has risen sharply and consistently since September 2008 to 6.9 percent in May, the highest since December 1993. Is this a temporary phenomenon that will revert back to recent rates once the recession ends, or a longer-term shift in consumer sentiment? What factors are driving this change? How high might savings go? What would be the implications, good and bad, for the U.S. economy if savings returned to the 8-10 percent range that prevailed from 1960 to 1990?
-- John Maggs, NationalJournal.com
8 responses: John S. Irons, Mark Bloomfield, Gary Burtless, Desmond Lachman, William Gale, Guy de Jonquières, Charles Calomiris, Jeffrey Frankel
Greg Mankiw notes the latest unemployment numbers, plotted against the Obama administration's prediction of what would have occurred without the $787 billion stimulus plan and what would happen with it. Should Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer issue an updated forecast of the stimulus plan's effects? Will stimulus opponents convince many people that the stimulus was a failure? Was it clearly folly to make the jobs promises in the first place?
-- John Maggs, NationalJournal.com
7 responses: John S. Irons, James Sherk, Desmond Lachman, Gary Burtless, Grover Norquist, Martin Baily, Charles Calomiris
