Bailout

Counterparties

Posted on January 23, 2010
Dominoes Keep Falling After Scott Brown's Win. Is Bernanke next? -- Atlantic Wire

Where we went wrong in housing

Posted on January 23, 2010
Go read this interview with Steve Waldman, one of the econoblogosphere's most thoughtful and intelligent writers. Here he is on the morals of walking away from your mortgage:

Moral hazard datapoint of the day

Posted on January 23, 2010
In order to believe that there was a connection between moral hazard and the financial crisis, says Jim Surowiecki,

More NYT paywall math

Posted on January 23, 2010
  Gabriel Snyder does his own math, and comes to exactly the same conclusion as both me and Erick Schonfeld: optimistically speaking, the NYT is likely to make no more than about $35 million a year from a nytimes.com paywall -- a small fraction of its digital advertising revenues...

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Who values big banks?

Posted on January 23, 2010
The Epicurean Dealmaker has some stern words for those -- Andrew Ross Sorkin springs to mind -- who would say that there are some things only big banks can do:

Should Krugman replace Bernanke?

Posted on January 23, 2010
What would happen if Ben Bernanke withdrew his name from consideration as Fed chairman tomorrow, and Barack Obama picked up the phone and asked Paul Krugman to step into the breach? Bruce Bartlett reckons that "Paul has enough sense not to accept the position even if it is offered--just as Milton Friedman rejected Reagan's offer for him to replace Volcker in 1982" -- but I'm not so sure...

Counterparties

Posted on January 22, 2010
I think it was Goldilocks, not the bears -- Reuters

A big change at Lending Club

Posted on January 22, 2010
Lending Club CEO Renaud Laplanche said something very interesting in his response to my most recent post on peer-to-peer lending. "Currently, the platform is 'demand constrained?, meaning that we have more investors willing to invest in these loans than loans available,' he wrote.

The US and UK regulators try to play better together

Posted on January 22, 2010
There's a lot of blame to go round for the chaotic implosion of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. But very high up the list is the utter lack of communication and cooperation between authorities in the US and the UK: while panicked all-nighters were being pulled at the New York Fed offices, no one attempted to bring the Brits into the loop until it was too late...

Is the NYT meter really a navigation fee?

Posted on January 22, 2010
Jay Rosen says he's "uncommitted" in terms of passing judgment on the NYT metering plan, but the broad outlines of his take seem clear: insofar as it's a metering plan as that term is commonly understood, it's not a good idea. But it isn't, and we still don't really understand what it is, so it's still too early to judge.

A closer look at the Volcker rule

Posted on January 22, 2010
There are two big questions overhanging the Volcker/Obama announcement yesterday: will it be enacted, and if it is, will it make any difference.

Counterparties

Posted on January 21, 2010
More than 70% of mortgage modifications result in an increase in the principal amount -- HuffPo

Volcker makes his move

Posted on January 21, 2010
Dare I hope? The teaser in the WSJ about a big announcement from Barack Obama tomorrow sounds almost too good to be true. A cap on the size of financial institutions! A ban on risky investments in things like hedge funds and private equity! A real wall between commercial banking and speculative prop trading!

How the CFPA would stop neg-am mortgages

Posted on January 21, 2010
Beer and Numbers asks for the grounds on which a consumer financial protection agency would ban a particular negative-amortization mortgage. I can think of a few.

Reacting to the Obama plan

Posted on January 21, 2010
The reactions to the Volcker-Obama bank plan seem to be veering off to extremes. On one side, the Financial Services Forum is talking about how it's a bad idea to "preemptively break up large, well-managed, and well-capitalized banking companies", which is wrong on two levels: no it's not, but in any case no one's proposing any break-ups at all...

The devil in the NYT meter?s details

Posted on January 21, 2010
One issue which I'm sure has yet to be settled inside NYT headquarters is the status of blogs vis-a-vis the nytimes.com paywall. On the one hand, blogs are a central part of the website's value proposition -- exactly the sort of extra digital content that they want people to pay for...

Make that two cheers for Obama

Posted on January 21, 2010
In public, Barack Obama was stern and tough:

Quote of the day, Goldman edition

Posted on January 21, 2010
Quote of the day comes from Goldman Sachs CFO David Viniar, responding to confusion over whether the squid's 36% compensation ratio for 2009 is here to stay:

Bair?s mortgages

Posted on January 21, 2010
The Huffington Post has done a lot of hard journalistic work in nailing down the facts about Sheila Bair's mortgages, and I'm glad they did. Bair does seem to have received something of a sweetheart mortgage from BofA when she refinanced her Amherst house, and she shouldn't have been negotiating in her FDIC capacity with BofA at the same time.

Three cheers for Obama?s banking reforms

Posted on January 21, 2010
Barack Obama is coming out swinging today, and good for him for doing so. Let's go through the press release line by line:

Cutting pay at Goldman

Posted on January 21, 2010
Goldman Sachs has always prided itself on leading the investment-banking pack in terms of compensation. Because it's richer and more successful than anybody else, it can pay more than anybody else can afford, forcing them to spend money that would be better used elsewhere on bonuses...

Counterparties

Posted on January 20, 2010
How do I know Citi's results are bad? The headline leads with a non-GAAP metric I've never heard of, "managed revenues" -- Citi

Using Tyler Cowen to help Haiti

Posted on January 20, 2010
Can someone press-gang Tyler Cowen into being a key part of the US government's response to Haiti? Cowen knows and loves the country, and his ideas about how to help -- as well as his grasp of the magnitude and complexity of the problem -- have been consistently one step ahead.

Running the numbers on the NYT paywall

Posted on January 20, 2010
Apologies for being something of a one-trick pony today, but reading John Gapper's column on the NYT paywall makes me realize that a lot of people fail to appreciate exactly what's at stake here. Gapper seems to think that online subscription revenues can make newspapers profitable again; they can't...

The legal and necessary bank tax

Posted on January 20, 2010
John Carney has a post up today saying that the bank tax is unconstitutional; it's incredibly unconvincing, not least because he ignores the fact that the tax is required by law. Far from being an ex post facto appropriation, it was entirely foreseeable -- and necessary -- from the day the TARP bill was passed.

The economics of the NYT paywall

Posted on January 20, 2010
Preston Austin has managed to squeeze the economics of a NYT-style paywall into one tweet, but it's compressed, so let me expand it into slightly more than 140 characters.

The NYT?s paywall

Posted on January 20, 2010
It's official: the NYT is putting up an FT-style paywall; the paper's Richard Pérez-Peña fills in a few of the gaps.

Counterparties

Posted on January 19, 2010
Gretchen makes a good point: Will the new credit card rules actually be enforced? Without CFPA, they might not be -- NYT

A retirement-fund paradox

Posted on January 19, 2010
David Merkel is insightful when it comes to a huge status-quo bias in retirement funds. If we have a lump sum, we're loathe to convert it to a guaranteed income, even when we value the guaranteed income that we do have extremely highly:

The future of the cable-TV business model

Posted on January 19, 2010
For reasons that I don't fully understand, Jim Surowiecki is not a fan of a-la-carte cable pricing, where you just pay for the channels you want, and not for the channels you don't want. My views on the matter haven't changed since 2007, but one big thing has: broadcast TV is now digital, which means that cable companies are extremely constrained as to how much they could charge for network TV in an a-la-carte world...

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