Bubba And The Bubble

Peter Baker‘s interview with the 42nd President in the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times (which is available now, of course) is getting a lot of blog postings. Getting the most attention is his discussion of his role in the financial crisis.

David Leonhardt in NYT

Matt Y

Mark Thoma

If a Clinton clone had been in charge rather than Bush, would this have still happened? I can’t be sure, of course, and maybe the clone administration would have stepped in before things got out of hand, but little cues like the deference to Greenspan he indicates above (who would have opposed trying to prick the bubble if he had admitted a bubble was inflating) makes me wonder. So I think it probably would have happened anyway.

But, and this is important, perhaps the Treasury wouldn’t have dragged its feet for months and months only to turn the problem over to the next administration if there had been more continuity, and I believe that acting faster to solve the toxic asset problem could have made a big difference in limiting the severity of the resulting downturn. In addition, without Republicans standing in the way with veto power, the shape of the initial and subsequent stimulus packages would have been different as well. So while I’m not so sure that the outcome would have been different in terms of the bubble, I do believe the response would have been quite a bit different, and much better than what actually occurred.

Noam Scheiber at TNR

But Ezra Klein, while thinking Clinton credible, has some quibbles:

Clinton swears he was “queasy” about derivatives back in the ’90s. Not queasy enough to do anything about them, but enough to bring them up with Alan Greenspan. If the derivatives market had been three or four times larger than it had been in 1997 — and if it had gotten that way in a matter of years — maybe Clinton would have gotten downright nauseous and decided something needed to be done. Or maybe not. It’s hard to say. But it’s not something that Clinton, or his critics, can prove or disprove. In the mid-to-late ’90s, we were barely beginning to connect the dots on the tech bubble. The housing bubble was still a decade away.

Kevin Drum starts off on Clinton and goes on to bigger topics, like what caused the crisis in the first place:

On the other hand, I’ve also been thinking a lot about the financial meltdown of the past two years and wondering how much of what we think we know is really true anyway.  Structured finance, for example, has gotten a lot of blame for the crisis, but Dean Baker argues persuasively that derivatives and financial engineering didn’t really have much to do with it.  It was purely and simply the result of a housing bubble, and the size of the collapse and the ensuing recession are pretty much what years of academic research predicts given the size of the price runup.  You just don’t need anything more to explain it.

In a similar vein, Jim Hamilton has suggested that if you model the 2007-08 runup in oil prices you get pretty much the recession that we got.  And James Surowiecki points out that the IMF’s estimate of capital shortages in the American banking system isn’t actually as large as a lot of us have been thinking — and the market seems to agree.  Bank stocks have been rising since early March, and after the stress test results were announced banks started raising startling amounts of private capital almost immediately.

What else?  John Hempton has argued that the FDIC’s takeover of Washington Mutual, which was responsible for at least part of the flight of private capital from the banking sector, was an act of unwarranted panic.  Recent events suggest he was right. Likewise, it turns out in retrospect that the collapse of Lehman Brothers wasn’t quite the catastrophe we thought it was at the time.  Rather, it was panic in the wholesale funding markets caused by Reserve Prime breaking the buck — an event related to the Lehman collapse but by no means the same thing.

Meanwhile more MSM-y blogs are looking at different bits of the interview:

Holly Bailey at Newsweek’s The Gaggle on Clinton and Obama.

Michael Scherer on Clinton and women (at least, I think that’s what he’s talking about. Unless he’s saying Clinton had a drug problem.)

UPDATE: Ezra Klein again.

And Peter Baker on Charlie Rose

UPDATE #2: Timothy Noah in Slate

I’ll Take Things Having To Do With The Mouth And Supreme Court Nominees For $800, Alex

Mark Krirkorian set off a blogstorm with this post at The Corner about pronounciation. He followed up with this:

Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference), unlike my correspondent’s simple preference for a monophthong over a diphthong, and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.

Kerry Howley in Reason:

Hear hear! And it’s a crying shame we all capitulated to the Italians in calling Alito Aleeto. Henceforth I encourage all of you to order whores-de-vores if you’d like to eat something prior to an entree main meal. Anything less would be downright disrespectful to the English language, which as we all know rose fully formed from the magical tongues of Anglo-Saxon royalty, wholly unpoisoned by Latinate or Norman influence. (And let’s please hand it to conservatives for consistently denying evolution in any form.)

Kevin Drum and James Joyner posted about the same time on this. Drum:

You know, I’m lousy at pronoucing non-English words.  If you want a nicely rolled R, look elsewhere.  But so-toe-my-OR?  Give me a break.  A five-year-old can do that.  Just like we all got used to pronouncing the president’s name ba-ROCK.

This is going to be a long couple of months.

Joyner:

Ultimately, American English both evolves and has regional variants.  The further a foreign pronunciation from sounds familiar in American English and its local dialects, the less likely we are to adopt it.  But once-unfamiliar names can become familiar over time.   I’m sure even in Tuscaloosa, they pronounce our president’s name “Oh BOM uh” rather than the more natural “Oh BAM uh.”

Holly Bailey at The Gaggle at Newsweek

Isaac Chotiner

Steve Benen

Sadly, No

Changing from language to food, Alexander Bolton in The Hill:

This has prompted some Republicans to muse privately about whether Sotomayor is suggesting that distinctive Puerto Rican cuisine such as patitas de cerdo con garbanzo — pigs’ feet with chickpeas — would somehow, in some small way influence her verdicts from the bench.

Curt Levey, the executive director of the Committee for Justice, a conservative-leaning advocacy group, said he wasn’t certain whether Sotomayor had claimed her palate would color her view of legal facts but he said that President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee clearly touts her subjective approach to the law.

Brian Beutler at TPM:

Slightly gobsmacked, I called Bolton earlier today and asked him whether this was for real–whether any conservatives were genuinely raising this issue. He confirmed, saying, “a source I spoke to said people were discussing that her [speech] had brought attention…she intimates that what she eats somehow helps her decide cases better.”

DougJ wants to see her birth certificate.

Wonkette

Ezra Klein on more important matters:

Sadly, Sotomayor will find Washington, D.C. a bit bereft of good Latin food. As a native Californian, that’s done the most to slow my adjustment to District-living. But there are exceptions. Mt. Pleasant and Columbia Heights can occasionally taste of home. Pollo Sabrosa has wonderful Peruvian chicken, fried yucca, and Mexican-style tacos. Taco District Federal has a chorizo, goat, and pork skin tacos that will make you want to firebomb a Cosi, not to mention the outdoor grilling they do on weekends. And the delightful Taco Pepitos Bakery 2 stands in silent rebuke to the nearby Mixtec, which charges $12 for a couple of tacos and a handful of chips.

A recipe for patitas de cerdo con garbanzo.

EARLIER: The Spanish Word For “Kabuki” Is Kabuki

Justice Sotomayor

Jeffrey Rosen Gets A Post Of His Own

$100 on Sonia Sotomayor?

UPDATE: Steve Benen on food.

UPDATE #2: Conor Friedersdorf on Krikorian

Krikorian responds to all.

UPDATE #3: Paul Krugman

John Hood in NRO:

Anglicizing foreign names while speaking in English isn’t just a practical necessity and a sign of good manners (yes, that’s right). As others have said, it’s a habit that helps to bind together people of diverse backgrounds. I’m not just talking about the recent past. Let’s just be clear here: If the new rule is that it is disrespectful to pronounce proper names in any way other than how the natives say it, then I’m putting all Yankees, Midwesterners, and pedants on notice that I will be outraged if my first name is not henceforth pronounced with both syllables.

We’ve Got Your Gaffes Right Here, Part #3

Biden talks about a secret bunker. The Gaggle in Newsweek. Fox News piece on it.

Michelle Malkin

Stephen Hayes in The Weekly Standard:

Despite more than fifteen trips to the VPR over the past five years, and despite having conducted dozens of interviews about security precautions taken for Cheney and his staff after 9/11, I was never told such a bunker existed.

I was able to learn and write about Cheney’s getaways at Camp David, extra measures taken for him when he traveled on Air Force Two, and even the use of a “dummy” plane sometimes used in combat zones. But no one ever mentioned this secure facility at the Naval Observatory.

The obvious conclusion: Its existence was highly classified.

Allah Pundit

Michael Crowley in TNR

Wonkette mocks:

Depending on which whose reader comments you look at, this news about the bunker is either not news at all, or it is a felony breach of national security. And the VP either hides under his house like a common hobo during national emergencies, or he just hides his advisers there, or the whole lot of them go to some cave in Pennsylvania. Either way, it’s hard to see how the terrorists don’t win.