Wall St. welfare

What Paul Krugman said. 

Some of Krugman's commentators are pretty good too. Most resonant with me, I fear, was the one who began (roughly): 'This is why I didn't vote for Obama in the primaries...'. Obama is a transformative figure symbolically and stylistically, and his being good rather than evil is a pretty radical change in context. But none of that entails that he's even going to attempt to change the culture of kleptocracy which has now sunk the American economy. My hope is that his current deference to the right and the rich (hiring Summers et al., not really trying to fix TARP) is an elaborate Plan A which he will be able to ditch in a year or so when everyone's been given enough rope and things have only gotten much worse. My fear is that he's a hardcore Rubinomics man himself, and just doesn't grasp how broken the system is or see what's fundamentally wrong with taxpayer-funded robber baronry. 

And actually, I have an even deeper fear. This is that Obama does understand the problem, but seriously believes he can change the self-interested behaviour of bad agents through the magical power of his personal moral authority, whether that means being generous and responsive to House Republicans or speaking mighty Words of Chastisement to bonus-taking bankers. In which case he's delusional, and there may be no Plan B at all. 

UPDATE: Joseph Stiglitz says it too.