• Rob Johnson and I talk about Timothy Geithner's Private/Public Plan (YouTube).
• Stiglitz: "Treasury hopes to get us out of the mess by replicating the flawed system that the private sector used to bring the world crashing down, with a proposal marked by overleveraging in the public sector, excessive complexity, poor incentives and a lack of transparency."
• Jamie Galbraith's testimony on Lessons From the New Deal (PDF): "Social insurance addressed a fundamental problem of capitalism: unregulated private markets are unstable. They cannot be relied on to provide an adequate minimum living standard for the working population. They cannot be relied on to provide a secure repository for savings. They cannot be relied upon to provide decent incomes in retirement. The problem of the Depression was perhaps above all a problem of insecurity, or as Roosevelt put it, of 'fear itself."
• Sarkozy threatens to walk out of G20 if Obama doesn't agree to tighter global financial regulation, saying "the crisis is too serious for us to hold a summit for nothing. . . . If things don't advance in London there will be an empty chair. I'll get up and leave."
• Simon Johnson applauds Obama's push for more open governance of the IMF: "The masterstroke is simple and also brilliant. The US is pushing for - and likely to get - the Managing Director (known as the MD) of the IMF to be selected through an open, competitive and merit-based selection process."
• The GAO says that there is only $32 billion left in the TARP fund, contra Tim Geithner who insists there is $135 billion left. Turbotax error perhaps?
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