Mick Weinstein The Week's Best Stock Blogs

"I don't care if you are driving in a hybrid or an SUV -- if you are driving toward a cliff, you've got to change directions," said President Obama Thursday while presenting his administration's $800 billion-plus stimulus plan. In a similar egalitarian spirit, Obama on Wednesday announced he'd like to cap compensation for top executives at companies receiving "exceptional" federal aid in the future. Econobloggers weighed in on this week's policy proposals from Washington:

The $3k Per U.S. Citizen Stimulus Plan

• Jesse Eisinger urges the president to stop trying to form a consensus and start acting boldly, as he had promised: "It's time to put some bullets in the heads of the zombies [Wall St. and Republicans] and take control."

• Remember Richard Pryor in the movie 'Brewster's Millions'? 'The Economist's' blog FreeExchange draws a parallel to today -- Obama's Billions: "They need to spend a lot of money in a short amount of time without generating big permanent increases in government budgets. And that, as Monty Brewster discovered, isn't easy to do."

• Megan McArdle is "weakly convinced that spending does have more stimulative effects than tax cuts." For more on this particular contentious matter, see Tyler Cowen.

• Harvard economics prof. Greg Manikiw presents his preferred fiscal stimulus: "I would institute an immediate and permanent reduction in the payroll tax, financed by a gradual, permanent, and substantial increase in the gasoline tax."

• Diane Lim Rogers draws a distinction between short-term and longer-term goals of stimulating the economy: "If the goal is longer-term growth, we need to focus on policies that truly increase our nation's productive capacity, policies that will leave us -- beyond the recession -- with new and useful infrastructure, new and efficient technologies, and a healthier and better-educated labor force."

• Mark Zandi in Real Time Economics in 'The Wall Street Journal': "If I were king for the day I might define the stimulus differently...The part of it that doesn't really fit what I was hoping for was the spendout ratio on infrastructure. The spendout ratio is slower than expected."

• Markham Lee is troubled by proposed tax breaks for new cars -- but nothing for doctor bills: "Perhaps instead of encouraging people to continue (or revisit) their bad habits, our government should be thinking about how to incentivize savings."

• Law professor and 'Instapundit' author Glenn Reynolds says the "killer question on the stimulus is, What's the rush? A week or two won't make a difference. Heck, a month wouldn't."

• Jay Liao concurs with James Surowiecki that the stimulus plan may be "all about the framing."

• Finally, Jeff Miller presents "fear and loathing of the stimulus plan."

Executive Pay

• Felix Salmon thinks the proposed $500,000 pay cap for CEOs at institutions that receive large amounts of bailout money will be productive: "There might be problems in hiring top talent, over the long term, if no one in the company is going to make more than $500,000. But that's not what's going on: For one thing, these salary restrictions are explicitly temporary, and for another, they don't apply to more junior employees."

• Joe Wiesenthal at Clusterstock: "This was actually an extremely narrow announcement, covering only a few people at a handful of firms, and even they can probably get paid well under the right scenario... but ultimately we're happy about that, since executive pay debates are all about perception, not about economics."

• McArdle , tongue firmly in cheek: "Maybe figuring out how to live on such meagre returns will be valuable training for figuring out how to operate a financial services firm without regular infusions of taxpayer cash."

• From the right, Michael Graham lays into Barney Frank's advocacy of extending the CEO pay cap to all U.S. corporations; from the left, Jonathan Tasini says the proposed pay caps are merely "a mirage."

Fixing the Banking System

• Yves Smith, upon hearing of the Obama administration's latest plans to aggressively buy and/or guarantee toxic assets on financial firms' balance sheets: "Dear God, let's just kiss the US economy goodbye. It may take a few years before the loyalists and permabulls throw in the towel, but the handwriting is on the wall." Surowiecki challenges Smith, and believes her position "certainly doesn't describe the way bailed-out banks have acted over the past four months."

• Roger Ehrenberg appreciates Obama's "passionate" delivery on TV last night, yet regarding the financial sector, he believes "[t]he ideas being proposed simply won't work, and I don't care which Harvard Ph.Ds are saying so. It is a matter of transparency. It is a matter of good governance. It is a matter of creating healthy institutions that are in a position to fund the renewal and growth of this country. Current plans do not contemplate any of these things."

• Yale Law student James Kwak: "I don't envy President Obama's economic team. When it comes to fixing our banking system, there is no easy solution... any scheme in which the banks receive more than market value is a gift from taxpayers to bank shareholders, and any scheme in which they are forced to take market value is one that the banks will not participate in."

• Accrued Interest weighs in on Tim Geithner's "bad bank/worse bank" proposal: "Banks get very little in fresh cash, only certainty as to the downside on their assets. But I argue that's not all bad. If we just give banks cash, they are essentially allowed to grow earnings on the backs of taxpayers."

Finally, for those who can't get enough of the Bernard Madoff story, a few interesting items emerged this week:

• It seems 'The Wall St. Journal' blew a chance to expose Bernie a few years ago. Those editors must have been kicking themselves when Madoff turned himself in, in early December.

• A full list of Madoff clients was released by the courts -- do you know anyone?

• Would a blog from Harry Markopolos, the Madoff whistleblower who testified before Congress this week, have stopped Madoff long ago? I think it's likely -- too bad he never started one.