Word: thingness
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...suppose the one thing is, thank God for Larry Summers, in the following sense: when monetary policy has lost all traction, then your only hope is fiscal policy. The danger with fiscal policy is that they'd do too little, because we've spent the last umpteen years saying we've got to keep our deficit under control. This is not the time to worry about that. Until [Summers] came along, I was struck by how modest all of the stimulus packages everyone was talking about were. He's sort of the [John] Maynard Keynes of today. He says...
...thing about the central bankers of the time is that you read their letters to each other, and they really were very worried in a way; I don't think Greenspan was worried enough two years ago. But they had these intellectual blinders on and basically were so rigidly tied to the gold standard that they had almost given up almost all degrees of freedom. They didn't do anything but agonize...
Executive determination, however, is certain to be little match for legislative power. For one thing, the U.S. government lacks any clear bureaucratic process for deciding quickly which projects to fund and which to avoid outside of the political arena. For another, the new President's only route to the U.S. Treasury must pass through the halls of the same appropriators in Congress - both Republican and Democrat - who have overseen the terrific expansion of often wasteful federal spending over the past decade. Whether or not they call it a Christmas tree, in other words, a Christmas tree it will surely...
...some Western observers in Baghdad, it seemed like an odd thing for al-Maliki to mention, given the more momentous theme of the day. The MEK is an obscure group known for launching attacks on Iran in the 1980s and '90s, when Iraq and Iran were bitter, warring enemies. But since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the MEK has been stripped of its weapons, confined to its base at Camp Ashraf about 80 miles north of Baghdad and guarded by U.S. troops. The group is hardly an immediate threat to Iraqi security, or even particularly relevant to the challenges Iraq...
...took eight days of phone calls and e-mails before I saw my bag again. But the shocking thing is that the luggage eventually showed up, safe and sound, in Baghdad, even escaping the airport's notoriously sticky-fingered baggage handlers. It was a small but telling sign that Iraq is indeed entering a new phase, not just in troop levels and casualty counts but also in smaller areas of security. Foreign reporters like me who return to the country can now stress out more about baggage than about roadside bombs on the way home from the airport. (For more...