Brad DeLong is my weathervane for sensible, moderate center-left thinking on economic policy. And he says it’s time to nationalize Citigroup:
No real point to merging it into JPMorgan Chase or Bank of America. And it is definitely too big to fail.
Who wants to be Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Citigroup? […]
Yep. Time to do it. Swedish model. No more of this “preferred stock capital injection” business. Common stock. And with commitment comes control.
I dunno, Robert Rubin? He knows both buildings. Probably not. But it is a question as the crisis drives us into deeper involvement in the financial sector. You don’t want these decisions being made by people who don’t know what they’re talking about (not me, for example) but it’s hard to find people who are knowledgeable about finance (as opposed to general economics) who don’t work in finance in a way that makes them compromised.