Bailout

Counterparties

Posted on November 03, 2010
Federal Reserve Rains Money On Corporate America -- But Main Street Left High And Dry -- HuffPo

BNP Paribas is not the largest bank in the world

Posted on November 03, 2010
Bloomberg not only should know better; it does know better. And it says as much, in paragraph 21 of its story. But that doesn't stop it from leading the story with this:

Wine market arbitrage of the day

Posted on November 03, 2010
Price of 2009 en primeur Chateau Lafite in Hong Kong, per case: $70,000

Sailing QE2 around Charybdis

Posted on November 03, 2010
It's easy to see the logic behind the Fed's latest bout of quantitative easing. Indeed, the official Fed statement lays it out quite plainly: the economy is struggling, and needs all the help it can get; meanwhile, inflation is lower than the Fed would like to see...

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Conspiracy theory of the day, Foundation X edition

Posted on November 03, 2010
Don't believe for a minute that the likes of Rand Paul are bringing a whole new level of nutty to upper-house politics, in contrast to staid and boring countries like the UK.

The economic consequences of gridlock

Posted on November 03, 2010
"The conventional wisdom likely to be repeated over the next few weeks," writes Mohamed El-Erian today, "is that political gridlock is good for the economy".

Summers?s incentives

Posted on November 02, 2010
This blog became a locus, in my absence, for a fascinating debate about economics and economists, which wended its way from David Segal to Stephen Gandel to Barbara to Justin to Brad DeLong and back to Barbara again.

Forcing all broker-dealers to go private

Posted on November 02, 2010
Check out Barbara's post on rules-based vs principles-based regulation, especially as it applies to the Volcker Rule. Volcker himself advocates a principles-based approach, contra Michael Lewis, who wants some very tough rules:

Counterparties

Posted on November 02, 2010
"High frequency trading provides valuable incremental liquidity when high frequency traders are the governor on the steam engine. When they become the engine itself, they can't provide stability." -- Derman

Rubin?s unhelpful fiscal exhortations

Posted on November 02, 2010
Oh dear, what have I signed up for? No sooner do I agree to start blogging more about economic journalism than I find this op-ed from Robert Rubin in the FT.

Back to my econoblogging roots

Posted on November 02, 2010
Dean Starkman has the official statement and Laura McGann has the embarrassingly verbatim Q&A: I'm the new CJR Peterson Fellow, which means that I'm going to be blogging more about macro and fiscal stuff -- or rather the press coverage thereof.

Newspaper paywall datapoint of the day

Posted on November 02, 2010
There's lots of schadenfreude at the expense of News Corp today, which finally released numbers on its UK paywalls.

It?s not the economists, it?s the economics

Posted on November 01, 2010
Economics might not entirely be up to the task of explaining what we generally consider to be economic phenomena because we are overconfident about what the discipline has the ability to account for.

Rattner?s Overhaul

Posted on October 31, 2010
I'm a fan of Steve Rattner's book about the auto bailout, Overhaul, and I'm also a fan of Malcom Gladwell's very tough review of it.

Economists respond to incentives

Posted on October 29, 2010
Economists believe that incentives matter?to others. They're right. But incentives matter to them, too.

Volcker?s rule on rules

Posted on October 29, 2010
It sounds a little nuts, but there may be good reasons, as Paul Volcker suggests, to keep new financial regulations as vague as possible.

Is all quantitative financial risk management bunk?

Posted on October 28, 2010
Amar Bhidé says the quantitative approach to modeling financial risk that arose in the 1960s and 1970s has proved worse than useless. Is he right about that?

What Gretchen Morgenson is good for

Posted on October 27, 2010
The New York Times columnist's work is clunky and predictable. So why does it so often turn out to be prescient?

How to clean up the muddy mortgage mess

Posted on October 27, 2010
How to clean up the muddy mortgage mess.

Why economists are(n?t) the answer to all our problems

Posted on October 27, 2010
Over at the Curious Capitalist, my former colleague Steve Gandel asks me to react to this NYT article about how economists manage to disagree on such fundamental questions as whether the government should spend more or less money in response to economic malaise.

The less you know about finance the better

Posted on October 25, 2010
Everywhere you turn these days, some bigwig policymaker is talking about the importance of financial literacy education.

What?s really behind that $1.3 trillion deficit?

Posted on October 25, 2010
The U.S. government's giant deficit in fiscal 2010 was mostly the result of falling tax revenue, not rising spending.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is not the same thing as American business

Posted on October 25, 2010
I don't understand why everyone is so surprised to find out that large corporations are funneling massive amounts of money to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Tim Geithner?s poor imitation of John Maynard Keynes

Posted on October 22, 2010
The U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has proposed to the G-20 that trade deficits and surpluses be capped at 4% of GDP. Keynes had a much better idea in 1944

Can you ethically invest in unethical companies?

Posted on October 22, 2010
I first met my friend David Neubert in the context of a website he co-founded, called The Panelist, devoted to "responsible and ethical investment advice".

The real revolution in microfinance

Posted on October 22, 2010
People often talk (and write) about how commercialization is changing the nature of microfinance.

When stocks become manipulable

Posted on October 21, 2010
Have you ever wondered how big a stock needs to be before it can be efficiently arbitraged? The Fundometry blog has done an investigation along those lines, and the answer would seem to be somewhere around $400 million in market cap.

Tax incentives: Boeing 707 edition

Posted on October 21, 2010
Lower taxes spur innovation? Not always. How an 82% corporate tax rate spurred the development of the passenger jet

BofA?s legal predicament

Posted on October 20, 2010
Nelson Schwartz links the big lawsuit against BofA/Countrywide directly to the mortgage bond scandal I've been banging on about:

Why do people care so much about the minimum wage?

Posted on October 20, 2010
Over at my old Time.com stomping grounds, Adam Cohen has written a fascinating article about the movement to have the federal minimum wage declared unconstitutional. This goes hand-in-hand with the emergence of the minimum wage as a campaign issue in the midterm elections...

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