Banking watch: ‘Fix’ Adds New Problems
The seizure of ailing First Republic Bank and sale to JPMorgan, argues Bloomberg’s Mohamed El-Erian, answers “the immediate threat of a disorderly failure” — but the “unintended consequences” may be “far from immaterial.” First, “the US now has a more concentrated banking system” with “ ‘too big to fail’/‘too big to manage’ banks becoming larger.” Add in “even greater doubt about the nature of the de facto deposit insurance system in place.” And “the total cost of First Republic’s resolution remains to be assessed.” But “the US economy continues to suffer from too many years of easy money,” so “first best policy responses are no longer available.”
Conservative: Press Cheers Joe’s Contempt
At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Biden joked: “In a lot of ways, this dinner sums up my first two years in office. I’ll talk for 10 minutes, take zero questions, and cheerfully walk away.” The Federalist’s Elle Purnell fumes: “The supposed journalists in attendance gleefully giggled along” — “a room full of people tasked with asking tough questions of the president, laughing as he boasts about not answering their questions at all.” Yet his hiding “from any kind of journalistic accountability” isn’t funny: “Biden’s occasional press conferences are typically brief and scripted, and he’s also simply held fewer of them than his recent predecessors.” Add news that “he not only possesses a cheat sheet of which ‘friendly’ reporters to call upon during press briefings, but also appears to have prior access to the exact questions they plan to ask.”
Border beat: Biden’s Dubious Surge Plan
When Title 42 ends May 11, the Biden administration says “illegal crossings could reach as high as 18,000 a day,” warns Nolan Rappaport at The Hill. And its plans could make it worse; Biden’s parole program may add “up to 360,000 asylum seekers a year to our already overwhelmed asylum system.” “The immigration court has a backlog of around 2.1 million cases” — needing about 4.2 years to complete. Team Biden should move “to ensure that it will reduce the backlogs in our immigration system instead of increasing them” with new legal pathways for asylum seekers.
From the right: Randi’s Slipping Power
Randi Weingarten’s “refusal to admit responsibility for her role in keeping schools closed” during COVID reminds The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn of “Johnny Friendly, the union boss struggling to maintain his iron grip over the docks in 1954’s ‘On the Waterfront.’ ” When Americans think of “the biggest obstacles to good public schools,” it’s often “Weingarten’s face that comes to mind.” A Gallup poll finds satisfaction with public schools at a 20-year-low. Yet Weingarten’s priorities now have “less to do even with teachers’ interests” than with those of “Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.” “Johnny Friendly and his union cronies controlled the docks with the help of the mob,” while Weingarten & Co. “maintain power only because of a public monopoly. It would all make a terrific movie.”
Gadfly: Vax Mandates End in Whimper
Once “one of the angriest and most divisive issues,” federal vaccine mandates are ending “not with a bang, but with a whimper,” notes National Review’s Jim Geraghty. The “requirements for federal workers and federal contractors” end May 11, with health-care workers next. President Biden announced the mandates Sept. 9, 2021, “more or less blaming the continuing Covid cases on the unvaccinated,” though “vaccination did not and does not prevent infection or sickness entirely” and “ ‘natural immunity’ from a previous Covid infection is at least as effective.” And the Supreme Court rapidly struck down the mandate for most private-sector workers. Biden’s mandates “represented a broken promise, a vast and unconstitutional overreach that scapegoated Americans for a continuing pandemic that wasn’t their fault, proved difficult or nearly impossible to enforce . . . and had only a middling at best effect on the problem it attempted to solve. In other words, they were a classic Joe Biden policy.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
Source link: https://nypost.com/2023/05/02/fix-adds-new-problems-bidens-dubious-surge-plan-and-other-commentary/