It's the strangest thing, to listen to two intelligent progressives talk about the economy without using talking points or jargon, isn't it?

Since Krugman has a new book ("End This Depression Now!"), he's out making the rounds on all the talk shows and it's so refreshing to hear him speak at length. It appears that His Shrillness is finally making some inroads with the Very Serious People, despite the austerians who still insist the obvious path to fiscal health is to cut harder! Faster! Longer!

This Bloomberg piece points out his position and that of other economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Larry Summers are beginning to filter into the European power centers:

Europe’s shifting emphasis from enforcing austerity to seeking economic growth marks a hollow victory for Nobel laureate Paul Krugman.

“I wish I’d been wrong for the sake of the world,” Krugman said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Carol Massar. “You can see that there has been a definite shift in opinion.”

The euro area’s push to revive confidence in its economy and financial markets by attacking budget deficits will be challenged at the ballot boxes of France and Greece on May 6 as the region’s economy skids toward its second recession in three years and unemployment nears 11 percent.

Leading demands for a revised strategy, French Socialist Francois Hollande, a reader of Krugman, tops President Nicolas Sarkozy in the polls with the warning that putting debt-cutting over expansion is “bringing desperation to people.” Elsewhere, Greeks are turning to anti-austerity parties, recession-wracked Spain and Italy are relaxing deficit targets, the Dutch government is splintering and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi is calling for a “growth compact.”

The U.K., which the International Monetary Fund reckons accounts for a third of the budget cuts in the 10 largest European Union countries, is already back in recession.

“You can’t do deficit reduction without the people” understanding and endorsing it, said Paul Martin, who as Canada’s finance minister through most of the 1990s turned a C$36 billion ($36 billion) shortfall into a surplus in three years. “Deficit reduction has to be balanced with growth and it’s pretty clear Europe (BEBANKS) has lost that balance.”

The debate has split policy makers, investors and academics alike as Europe pursued a cocktail of tax increases and spending cuts to beat a sovereign debt crisis that raged from Greece through Ireland and Portugal to the very heart of the single currency bloc.

[...] “Francois Hollande has read Krugman,” Michel Sapin, one of Hollande’s economic advisers, said in an interview. “His writings show that Hollande’s proposals are not a whim and that this idea that growth is key is spreading.”

To Krugman, advocates of fiscal retrenchment such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel are ideological “austerians” who by misunderstanding the ills they’re trying to cure risk “Europe’s economic suicide.” He calculates that paring government spending by one euro ($1.32) generates only about 40 cents in reduced debt in the short-run and 1.25 euros in lost production.

“Aggressive fiscal austerity is self-defeating if you can’t grow,” said Andrew Balls, the London-based head of European portfolio management at Pacific Investment Management Co. (PTTRX), which oversees the world’s largest bond fund. “Krugman is a highly respected economist with a prominent platform who provides a very clear explanation of that view.”

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PBS coverage of the President's speech in Osawatomie, Kansas

Tuesday morning Barack Obama channeled one of American history's truly transformative figures by visiting the tiny Kansas town where Teddy Roosevelt gave his "New Nationalism" speech over a century ago. It was refreshing to see the President invoke his predecessor, who was a powerful and fearless agent of change both inside and outside the White House.

For the first time the President directly confronted the injustice of our growing economic divide, which were caused by the ongoing rapacity of the already-wealthy. He promised to take real action against the bankers who accepted our help after ruining the economy, then went on hoarding the nation's wealth for themselves at everyone else's expense.

Teddy would have been proud.

But echoing the populist chords of the First Progressive Era isn't without its risks. The speech that Roosevelt gave in Osawatomie, Kansas in 1910 should serve as a beacon for the President and his fellow Democrats. It also warned future leaders that there is a price to paid for promises betrayed.

Roosevelt's Ghost

If Roosevelt's ghost had been hovering over the lectern today, no doubt it would have appreciated being remembered. But the apparition might also have repeated the words Roosevelt spoke on the same platform in 1910:

"It is of little use for us to pay lip-loyalty to the mighty men of the past unless we sincerely endeavor to apply to the problems of the present precisely the qualities which ... enabled the men of that day to meet those crises."

President Roosevelt fought relentlessly against the powerful financial interests of his time, who dominated the nation in pretty much the same way they dominate ours today. J. Pierpont Morgan famously offered to "send my man around to meet your man and sort it all out," but President Roosevelt didn't want to cut deals with powerful banking interests. He wanted to make them less powerful, and he got it done.

Four years after leaving office, Roosevelt was running for President again. People back then suggested that his ideas were too extreme: A minimum wage. Women's right to vote. Direct election of Senators. An eight-hour workday. But they all came true.

Now that's change you can believe in. And here's what Teddy Roosevelt told his Kansas audience that day.

Corrupt bankers must be prosecuted

More than one thousand bank executives were prosecuted after the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980's under Republican President Ronald Reagan. This week's 60 Minutes report presented overwhelming evidence of criminal behavior at the major banks. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission provided a wealth of evidence suggested criminal acts, as did the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. I analyzed information about leading executives at my former employer, AIG, that also seemed to suggest blatant illegal activity.

Yet, up to now, not one senior executive at a major financial institution has been prosecuted. There is no excuse for the Obama Administration's failure to prosecute anyone.

Teddy Roosevelt told the citizens of Osawatomie that "I believe that the officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law."

Personally responsible, the man said.

Meanwhile the Obama Justice Department sits idly by as the SEC continues to let major corporations pay slap-on-the-wrist fines for executive criminality - fines that are often paid by the same shareholders they deceived - while "neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing."

The Wall Street Casino

"No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned," said Roosevelt. "Every dollar received should represent a dollar's worth of service rendered-not gambling in stocks, but service rendered."

Today the financial sector is once again earning nearly 40 percent of the nation's corporate profits, and much of that income is earned by gambling in ways Roosevelt and his contemporaries couldn't have imagined.

As for "services rendered," there's not much of that going on. Lending remains at low levels, despite all the low-interest loans and other money-generating perks the banks have been given.

The Revolving Door

"One of the fundamental necessities in a representative government such as ours," said Roosevelt, "is to make certain that the men to whom the people delegate their power shall serve the people by whom they are elected, and not the special interests."

The Obama Administration, like the Bush and Clinton Administrations before it, has seen a revolving door between Wall Street and its economic officials. Larry Summers, Bill Daley, and others made millions on Wall Street before serving this White House.

Peter Orszag went directly from the President's service to a high-paying and vaguely designed position with Citigroup, a corrupt and inept mega-bank that wouldn't even existed had it not been for the ministrations of Clinton officials like Summers and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

Rubin went on to make more than 100 million dollars as an executive with the monolith he helped create, which then became the largest recipient of public largesse.

Roosevelt told his Kansas audience that "every national officer, elected or appointed, should be forbidden to perform any service or receive any compensation, directly or indirectly, from interstate corporations."

Corporate Personhood

"They're people, my friend!" That's what Mitt Romney told an audience member who asked him about the novel and warped idea of "corporate personhood" that's stripping real people of their ability to assert their rights against corporate interests.

"Corporate personhood"? Here's what TR had to say:

"We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of property to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of the rights of property as against the rights of men have been pushing their claims too far."

Roosevelt also said this in Osawatomie:

"The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare ..."

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As I wrote in a piece a couple of months ago, I am glad to be in the political party that is actually having a debate about how to revive the American middle class, because I think it is one of the two most central and important economic debates of our generation (the other being how do we convert our worldwide economy into one that doesn’t cook the planet). Given that the Republicans’ only big focus is how to keep taxes low on the rich and government too weak to function, I am happy my party’s debate is a little more focused on where it needs to be. The only problem I have with the debate is that too many of the establishment Democrats think it can be done without challenging the wealthy special interest status quo, the concentration of power in both our economy and politics.

Here’s one example of what I am talking about: a Larry Summers op-ed in the Washington Post just before Thanksgiving entitled “Three Ways to Combat Inequality.” I appreciate Summers caring enough about inequality to write something about it, but I found the op-ed disturbing (although not surprising) in that he totally buys into the establishment conventional wisdom that the reasons for increased inequality “lies substantially in changes in technology and globalization.” He goes on to say that on one side (presumably the side of crazy lefties), “the debate is framed in zero-sum terms, and the disappointing lack of income growth for middle-class workers is blamed on the success of the wealthy”. After that classic swipe, he talks about how the right wing is wrong not to worry about the issue at all, and then lists his three solutions: don’t reward the wealthy with special concessions, “pro-fairness, pro-growth tax reform,” and making sure there is more equity in areas like education and health care.

I agree with Summers on his three general policy proposals, although I suspect we would disagree on the details of those policy ideas — for example, I strongly support taxing speculation on Wall Street through a bill like Harkin and DeFazio’s Financial Transaction Tax, and Summers strongly opposed the idea while at the White House, and I strongly supported a public option on health care when Summers was happy to trade it away. But none of these three “solutions” do anything to more fundamentally solve anything, which Summers tacitly admits by saying upfront that inequality is pretty much inevitable because of globalization and technology. Summers, along with his mentor Bob Rubin and his protégé Tim Geithner, are dead wrong on their central approach to economic policy, which encourages “the market” (as they define it, at least) to do what it will and uses government to soften the rough edges and keep things from being quite so miserable for at least the poor. The fact that these proposals ignore the very heart of the matter, which is the power relations that drive our modern economy, speaks very loudly.

The reason that economic inequality, as well as the depth of the unemployment problem, is so much worse in the United States than in virtually every other modern, developed economy in the world is because labor unions are so much weaker here, and because our industries — especially our financial institutions — are so much more concentrated. The fact that countries like Germany, Sweden, Canada, Denmark, and Australia all weathered the worldwide financial crisis better than we did is because their unions kept wages relatively high so people had money to buy things, and because their big banks were not nearly so dominant a party of their economy. If globalization and technology were the big and inexorable causes of economic inequality, then every country would have the USA’s bad numbers on that score, but they don’t. Those two causes, which are so popular with conservative economists, are certainly a factor, but concentration of wealth flows more than any other thing from concentration of power. It was true in the ancient Roman Empire, as wealth basically flowed from the size of people’s armies and their friendship with the Caesars. Throughout the middle ages, the same patterns remained true. In the late 1800s in this country, concentration of wealth came about partly because of industrialization, but mostly because the big corporate trusts of the robber barons ran government through open bribery. In the 1920s, concentration of wealth rose to incredible new heights again, as the conservative pro-big business Republicans controlled government and big corporate trusts paid little in taxes, broke unions viciously, and speculated in the stock market with impunity.

Today, with unions as weak as they have been since the 1920s and major industries as concentrated as they have been since the 1890s, we have tremendous inequality and a disappearing middle class. That disappearing middle class includes a breakdown of small business in sector after sector as well, as the small guys have more and more trouble competing with big business. Four companies now control 70 percent of general retail sales; four grocery chains control 55 percent of grocery sales; three firms control 80 percent of beer sales, and two control 70 percent of toothpaste sales; five big oil companies control 60 percent of retail gas stations; four accounting companies lock down 70 percent of the accounting work done in this country. I could go on and on, in industry after industry, from telecom to agribusiness, from technology to pharmaceuticals. These huge conglomerates have destroyed tens of millions of small businesses, and even more jobs. They have broken unions and driven down wages. Their power is breaking the middle class in this country.

You know the biggest problem with all this concentration of wealth? These firms become so politically and economically powerful that government becomes their handmaiden: they are the ultimate Too Big to Fail companies. As a result, they distort our economy and government in terrible ways. One of the most essential reading items I have seen in a long time is a new report out of Bloomberg about the secret Federal Reserve loans to the Too Big to Fail banks during the financial crisis of 2008-9. It is an incredible read, documenting how much money was shelled out by Ben Bernanke with no strings attached to the biggest banks in America. They didn’t have to loan the money out to businesses, or invest it in promising new companies that might create jobs, or write down any loans to homeowners. And with virtually no interest loans (0.01 percent), these banks not only survived the financial crisis, but grew much bigger in size, made massive profits, and paid themselves record breaking bonuses. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is corruption on a scale never before seen in human history. The details are worth reading, even though it will probably make you ill.

Larry Summers, one of the two key architects of the repeal of Glass-Steagall and other financial deregulation of the late ’90s, doesn’t have any policy proposals in his what to do about economic inequality op-ed relating to countering the kind of concentration of wealth and power that gave us this kind of backroom dealing — deals that exacerbated the concentration of wealth even more. It is predictable but very sad. What we need are economic thinkers who also understand the most basic theory of the founding fathers, which is pluralism. Pluralism was that core idea of Madison’s that only by having power widely distributed could a democracy survive. That core idea is being fundamentally threatened today, because big banks on Wall Street and the other dominant economic powers that be have too much power (both economic and political), and unions and consumers and small businesses and the rest of the 99% have too little. Changing that will do far more to solve economic inequality than all of the policy ideas suggested by establishment thinkers like Summers combined.

The Larry Summerses of the world agree with the DFH's on identifying the problems, but as Robert Kuttner says, they are too chickenshit or too stubborn to actually agree with us when we call out the right things to do.

What Larry Summers Can't Bring Himself to Say

If you want to understand why the Obama administration’s heart is in the right place but it suffers from a chronic lack of political nerve, you need look no further than former chief economic advisor Larry Summers. On Sunday, Summers published a piece in the Financial Times warning that the recovery was at risk of sputtering out. His analysis was spot-on. But his proposed solutions were feeble, bordering on pathetic.

Summers declared boldly:

The problem in a period of high unemployment, as now, is a lack of business demand for employees… After bubbles burst, there is no pent-up desire to invest. Instead, there is a glut of capital caused by the over-investment during the period of overconfidence - vacant houses, malls without tenants, factories without customers.

Exactly so. And Summers went on to debunk such usual remedies as training programs, tax cuts, and deficit reduction for its own sake. Increasing the supply of qualified workers, he added, may even make things worse:

Training programs or measures to increase work incentives for those with high and low incomes may affect who gets the jobs, but in a demand-constrained economy will not affect the total number of jobs. Measures that increase productivity and efficiency, if they do not also translate into increased demand, may actually reduce the number of people working as the level of total output remains demand-constrained.

So, what’s solution? A big infrastructure program, or Stimulus II, right? Surely, that logically follows. Well, no.

..read on

It's maddening.

Atrios continues: All Wind-Up And No Pitch

It's basically the same with Klain, who spent time arguing with the imaginary hippies who were obsessed with the stimulus involving Big Projects. Now as a certified dirty hippie, I think there was a blown opportunity to make the case for big projects, though I don't think that's the same thing as thinking big projects should have been central to the stimulus. And thinking that some big projects would be a good thing isn't just Hoover Dam nostalgia, it's thinking that...there are some big projects that we should be doing!

Klain then goes on to make the case that we should be repairing things instead of focusing on big new projects. Well, this dirty hippie mostly agrees! Or, at least, agrees that while there shouldn't necessarily be a tradeoff, there are basically limitless fast opportunities to spend money repairing water systems.

However, after arguing that we should repair stuff, Klain goes on to say that... wait, nevermind, we shouldn't be repairing stuff!...read on

So we'll never really know why she left, because you'd think that Larry Summers would indeed be the one taking the fall (what with him being the person who didn't even present her stimulus proposal to Obama):

Christina Romer, chairwoman of Pres. Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, has decided to resign, according to a source familiar with her plans.

Romer, an economics professor at the University of California (Berkeley) before taking the key admin post, did not respond to repeated calls to her office.

"She has been frustrated," a source with insight into the WH economics team said. "She doesn't feel that she has a direct line to the president. She would be giving different advice than Larry Summers [director of the National Economic Council], who does have a direct line to the president."

"She is ostensibly the chief economic adviser, but she doesn't seem to be playing that role," the source said. The WH has been pounded for its faulty forecast that unemployment would not top 8% after its economic stimulus proposal passed.

Instead, the jobless rate is 9.5%, after exceeding 10% last year. It was "a horribly inaccurate forecast," said Bert Ely, a banking consultant. "You have to wonder why Summers isn't the one that should be taking the fall. But Larry is a pretty good bureaucratic infighter."

This version, of course, is contradicted on several points by the Wall Street Journal story:

"I never anticipated the amount of the contact I'd have with the president," she added. "If anyone had told me that I'd meet the president of the free world every day, I never would have believed it."

Among her challenges was explaining why her prediction that the Obama-backed fiscal stimulus would keep the unemployment rate below 8% proved overly optimistic. The unemployment rate is now at 9.5%.

"I certainly hoped it would be lower," she said. "The world deteriorated between November 2008 when I started" and the initial estimates were made "and when we took office January 21. Do I wake up every morning and wish it were 8% instead of 9.5%? You bet."

In internal White House circles, Ms. Romer occasionally clashed with Lawrence Summers, the Obama adviser and former Harvard University president and Treasury secretary. But on Thursday, she said, "If anyone had told me that I'd come to view Larry Summers as one of my dearest friends, I never would have believed it. But I do."

I thought this part was pretty interesting:

One thing she says she hadn't realized previously: "The degree to which you often only get one shot at something like the Recovery Act."

"An economist's natural instant is to do things in stages. You take one action, see what it does and see if you need more," she explained. But with the Bush administration Troubled Asset Relief Program to shore up the banks or the Obama fiscal stimulus, that proved wrong. "I didn't realize the degree to which you have only one shot."

Despite the fact that Paul Krugman, Jamie Galbraith and Joe Stiglitz were trying to get the word out? Either she's not too swift, or she's taking the fall for Summers.

Every time I hear this song from "Wicked," I picture Maureen Dowd lecturing Hillary Clinton what she should do to be popular.

As someone who backed Hillary Clinton in the primaries, I'd like to remind readers of some of the reasons progressive activists gave as "why we simply can't have Hillary as President."

"Everyone hates her." (That's probably why she's so popular.)

"She has no foreign policy experience." (I suppose that's why Obama named her Secretary of State.)

"She's a corporatist from the DLC wing of the party." (Hmm, I'd call that one a wash, considering we instead elected the man who hired Larry Summers and Tim Geithner.)

"The right wing will go after her, and the country can't take another eight years of that." (This is the one that really makes me laugh. When will Democrats learn it simply doesn't matter who we nominate? Anyone we support will get the same treatment.)

"We can't have Bill Clinton hanging around, getting into trouble." (You mean, like when Rahm asked him to talk to Joe Sestak?)

Look, I wanted Hillary Clinton because I figured she would be a lot more liberal on domestic policies, and I knew we were headed into an economic crash. It was pure self-interest. The tradeoff is, she's usually an AIPAC rubberstamp and a war hawk. As much as that disgusts me, I was willing to take that trade. But really, Obama hasn't been much better, has he?

The fact is, we'll probably never know what President Hillary Clinton would have done. Oh well, at least she's popular!

Chris Bowers has the scoop:

Here is a weekend factoid for you: among all living politicians in the United States who have ever held elected office, Hillary Clinton [is] the most popular.

That's right. Ever since she became Secretary of State, her favorables have soared into the mid-60's, putting her well clear of any other statewide officeholder in the country. The only national figures who are viewed as favorably as Clinton are Michelle Obama, Colin Powell, and David Patraeus. However, they have never run for office, which invariably lowers your favorables.

Hillary Clinton will turn 69 in in the final week of the 2016 campaign, which makes her slightly younger than Ronald Reagan when he first was elected in 1980. Also, as Secretary of State, a major presidential candidate, a U.S. Senator, and First Lady, she is also probably more credentialed than any other potential Presidential candidate, too. There is even talk she may become the next Secretary of Defense, further adding to her credentials.

Some have said that, in choosing Joe Biden as Vice-President, Barack Obama did not pick a successor to lead the Democratic Party. However, that needs rethinking. Because Barack obama made her Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton remains remarkably well-positioned to run for President in 2016, even more so than she was in 2008.

It wasn't even close.

I'd suggest that anyone who hasn't done it yet should find a small bank and move their accounts. Clearly, the people we elected aren't going to do anything about these monster banks:

A move to break up major Wall Street banks failed Thursday night by a vote of 61 to 33.

Three Republicans, Richard Shelby of Alabama, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and John Ensign of Nevada, voted with 30 Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, in support of the provision. The author of the pending overall financial reform bill in the Senate, Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, voted against it. (See the full roll call.)

The amendment, sponsored by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), would have required megabanks to be broken down in size and capped so that their individual failure would not bring down the entire system.

Under Brown-Kaufman, no bank could hold more than 10 percent of the total amount of insured deposits, and a limit would have been placed on liabilities of a single bank to two percent of GDP.

In practice, the amendment required the six biggest banks -- Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley -- to significantly scale down their size. It was touted as a way to end Too Big To Fail.

Though top Obama administration officials have not publicly opposed the amendment, its leading economists have opposed ending Too Big To Fail simply by breaking up the nation's financial behemoths. Austan Goolsbee and Larry Summers have both fought back against this idea, as has Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

"This is certainly a defeat for those who are concerned about the dangers of financial concentration in this country," Kaufman said in a statement after the vote. "Some causes are worth fighting for, and for me, the concern about the risks 'too big to fail' banks pose to the American economy and people is deep and profound given the economic tragedy millions of American have endured. I believe the debate itself -- though failing to gain a majority of votes -- has helped to change attitudes about the degree of financial concentration and power these megabanks now represent."

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In an interview on This Week with Jake Tapper, President Bill Clinton said he made a mistake listening to Bob Rubin and Larry Summers on derivatives, and said he should have tried to regulate them, despite Republican opposition:

TAPPER: One of the things that President Obama is pushing for is regulation of derivatives, and also with a thing called the Volcker rule, he’s trying to separate commercial banking interests from investment banking interests. These were things that were the opposite policies of Treasury Security Rubin and Summers at that time, do you think in retrospect they gave you bad advice on these issues?

CLINTON: Well, I think on the derivatives – before the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed, it had been breached. There was already a total merger practically of commercial and investment banking, and really the main thing that the Glass-Steagall Act did was to give us some power to regulate it – the repeal. And also to give old fashion traditional banks in all over America the right to take an investment interest if they wanted to forestall bankruptcy. Sadly none of them did that. Mostly it was just the continued blurring of the lines, but only about a third of all the money loaned today is loaned through traditional banking channels and that was well underway before that legislation was signed. So I don’t feel the same way about that.

I think what happened was the SEC and the whole regulatory apparatus after I left office was just let go. I think if Arthur Levitt had been on the job at the SEC, my last SEC commissioner, an enormous percentage of what we’ve been through in the last eight or nine years would not have happened. I feel very strongly about it. I think it’s important to have vigorous oversight.

Now, on derivatives, yeah I think they were wrong and I think I was wrong to take it because the argument on derivatives was that these things are expensive and sophisticated and only a handful of investors will buy them and they don’t need any extra protection, and any extra transparency. The money they’re putting up guarantees them transparency. And the flaw in that argument was that first of all sometimes people with a lot of money make stupid decisions and make it without transparency.

And secondly, the most important flaw was even if less than 1 percent of the total investment community is involved in derivative exchanges, so much money was involved that if they went bad, they could affect a 100 percent of the investments, and indeed a 100 percent of the citizens in countries, not investors, and I was wrong about that. I’ve said that all along. Now, I think if I had tried to regulate them because the Republicans were the majority in the Congress, they would have stopped it. But I wish I should have been caught trying. I mean, that was a mistake I made.

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From This Week with Jake Tapper, an interview with Obama economic advisor Larry Summers:

TAPPER: OK. The president has said he wants -- in the next few weeks, he wants the Senate to pass financial regulatory reform. First of all, just quickly, do you guys have the 60 votes to pass Senator Chris Dodd's bill on financial regulatory reform?

SUMMERS: I expect that reform is going to pass. It's not easy. You've got $1 million being spent per congressman in lobbying expenses on this issue. Industry has four lobbyists per member of the House and Senate working on this.

But the case for basic consumer protection, the case for regulating institutions that are able to bring the economy down and not leaving them completely unregulated, the case that we've got to be able to handle the failure of an institution without a major bailout through so-called resolution authority, the case that we can't let institutions choose their own regulator -- play one regulator off -- against another to reduce standards -- that case is so compelling that we are confident that a sufficient majority will see that case and will vote to support financial reform.

We've come a -- we've come a -- come a long way on this issue. We're now in the final stages. Our expectation is that we will get there, and there's no question, I mean, how can anyone take a position after what has happened, after -- I mean, it's not the first thing that's happened...

TAPPER: Well, some -- some -- some Democrats...

SUMMERS: ... that we don't need -- that we don't need comprehensive financial reform.

TAPPER: Well, some...

SUMMERS: Probably (ph) work on the details, but not compromise on the principles.

TAPPER: Some Democrats say it doesn't go far enough. Here's Delaware Democrat Ted Kaufman talking about the Dodd bill.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAUFMAN: Unless Congress breaks up the mega-banks that are too big to fail, the American taxpayer will remain the ultimate guarantor of an almost certain to repeat itself cycle of boom, bust and bailout.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: Senator Kaufman is saying that there isn't being -- enough being done about too big to fail. In 2000, you said, quote, "It is certain that a healthy financial system cannot be built on the expectation of bailouts." Can you honestly say that the Dodd bill changes that?

SUMMERS: Yes, I can. It changes -- it reduces the expectation of bailouts by insisting that institutions have much more capital so they won't need to be bailed out. It eliminates the prospect of bailout by creating a framework in which a failure can be managed with creditors taking responsibility.

It restricts -- and this was the important point that former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker has stressed -- it restricts the so-called proprietary trading activities, some of the most risky activities of these institutions. So, yes, this bill is a direct attack on too large to fail by making failure a possibility, as it has to be in a market system, and by making these institutions much safer and much sounder. Senator Kaufman is exactly right.

Washington Post's annual Peeps Diorama Contest winner. See slideshow of all winning entries here.

Happy Easter! As you read this, my little one is anxiously looking outside for the treat-filled eggs the Easter bunny has left. And of course, there will be Peeps. Oh yes, there will be Peeps. Between you and me, I would almost rather my kids exercise their creativity by making a Peeps diorama over the alternative of eating them. Maybe I'll show them the slide show and start a new Easter tradition.

Speaking of tradition, if it's Sunday, you know that part of the McCain gang will out talking trash about the administration. What better day than Easter Sunday to trot out Holy Joe Lieberman? He'll be on Meet the Press. The economy is foremost on the bobblehead brain, as Larry Summers, Christina Romer and Alan Greenspan leave their little peeps of conventional wisdom on This Week, State of the Union and Meet the Press. Face the Nation opts to go the full bobblehead route with a journalist roundtable. And good ol' Chris Matthews is still focusing on whether Obama is too liberal or trying to move to the center. Actually, maybe I shouldn't be too quick to get rid of that candy. I think I might need the sustenance of some chocolate to make it through the morning.

ABC's "This Week" - National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers; former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Journalists' roundtable.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Christina Romer, chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers; Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif.; Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.; former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Chuck Todd, Norah O'Donnell, Helene Cooper and David Ignatius. Topics: Will Obama's Centrist Moves Blunt 2012 GOP Attacks That He's Too Liberal? Why Hasn't Obama Held a Primetime Press Conference Since Last July?

CNN's "State of the Union" - Summers; Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren; John Thompson III, Georgetown men's basketball coach.

Fareed Zakaria GPS: Thomas Friedman, Andrew Sullivan, Shah Rukh Khan.

"Fox News Sunday" - Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Arlen Specter, D-Pa.; Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

Okay, other than the kids bouncing off the walls in a sugar high, what's catching your eye this morning?