Bailout

The credit unions? fight against interchange regulation

Posted on June 10, 2010
Yesterday saw an enormous lobbying effort from the credit union industry; John Magill, the chief lobbyist for the Credit Union National Association, told me that there were over 400,000 "contacts" with Congress this week. He was on the phone with Harriet May, the CEO of a big El Paso credit union, GECU, and the chairman of the CUNA board...

New Jersey?s crazy war on oysters

Posted on June 10, 2010
In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, we've heard a great deal about how companies and regulators are bad at preventing things which are very unlikely to happen. One only wishes that was true of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection -- which seems to have transformed itself into the New Jersey Department of Completely Bonkers...

The FT?s experiment with paywalled blogs

Posted on June 10, 2010
Thanks to JDB for alerting me to the fact that the FT is now moving its blogs behind its paywall, starting with Money Supply:

Counterparties

Posted on June 09, 2010
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on tail risk -- WaPo

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Crossposting isn?t spamdexing

Posted on June 09, 2010
A rather angry commenter named IbexSalad reacted quite angrily to my post on Edward Hugh:

The ever-falling BP share price

Posted on June 09, 2010
With its latest stock-price plunge today, BP has broken three important psychological levels: it's below book value, it's trading at less than half of its 52-week high, and it's worth less than $100 billion. The culprit this time around would seem to be the dividend...

Why did Nafta have no effect on banking?

Posted on June 09, 2010
When Bank of America bought 25% of Santander's Mexican operations in 2002, it said that it was making a long-term strategic investment, both in Mexico and in the Latino market in the US:

The interchange fee panel

Posted on June 09, 2010
This morning's panel on interchange fees was a little bit frustrating, for me: there were lots of arguments, but everybody seemed to be talking past each other to a large degree. I particularly wanted to get into the argument, which was made by Todd Zywicki in his paper and also by Geoffrey Manne on the panel, that interchange fees were an important way of banks passing on credit losses to merchants...

Counterparties

Posted on June 08, 2010
"BP will spend the coming decades mired in endless litigation, its reputation irreparably damaged" -- NYT

The demographics of housing bubbles

Posted on June 08, 2010
I like Landon Thomas's profile of Ed Hugh, who has been blogging for as long as I can remember, and who is an indispensible voice in the econoblogosphere. Hugh's blog entries can be quite long, and I love the way that Thomas distilled one of a key argument:

World Cup betting pools: The price of entry

Posted on June 08, 2010
As the World Cup approaches, I'm sure that Reuters isn't the only place where betting pools are being filled out. Yahoo has quite a tool for such purposes, although it does require that everybody has a Yahoo account.

Why the payments system should be regulated

Posted on June 08, 2010
I'm about to head down to DC to appear on an interchange-fees panel sponsored by the libertarian types at GMU. I hope they read Mike Konczal's blog entry (and mine, of course), but at heart I think the disagreement is simply philosophical.

Corporate arrogance datapoints of the day

Posted on June 08, 2010
John Carney notes that Goldman Sachs is being much quieter in response to the FCIC's subpoena than it was in April:

How mortgage default could get much worse

Posted on June 08, 2010
Brent White, in his tour de force paper on how homeowners are guilt-tripped into remaining current on their mortgages even when doing so makes no financial sense, notes that non-profit organizations setting themselves up as friends of the consumer are in fact part of the problem:

How Goldman deals with the government

Posted on June 08, 2010
Comment of the day comes from HBC, on the subject of the FCIC's Goldman subpoena: Aww, cut Goldman some slack willya? They?re just not used to cooperating with the government. For years, it?s always been the other way round.

How to solve the fiscal dilemma

Posted on June 08, 2010
How should governments deal with enormous budget deficits? In Europe, the playbook seems to be clear: announce enormous budget cuts (see Germany, UK) only to be told that they're still not big enough.

Hungary: The Hungarian view

Posted on June 07, 2010
Was the Hungary-related market swoon on Friday the result of misguided naivete on the part of investors who really have no idea how to parse statements from Hungarian politicians? Erik D'Amato, in Budapest, certainly thinks so:

How Sequoia forced Tony Hsieh to sell Zappos

Posted on June 07, 2010
I just found Tony Hsieh's astonishing book excerpt in Inc, entitled "Why I Sold Zappos". It makes for very sad reading. Hsieh starts by explaining that he never wanted to sell to Amazon:

Interchange fees: The latest salvo

Posted on June 07, 2010
Tyler Cowen and Matt Yglesias have not had time to read Todd Zywicki's 63-page paper on interchange fees; it certainly doesn't need to be nearly as long as it is. But the fact is that you don't need to read all that far past the abstract to realize how silly and contentious it is.

Goldman?s Washington relations hit a new low

Posted on June 07, 2010
Goldman Sachs has lost another $2 billion in market capitalization today, as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission lashes out at its "you want documents? We'll give you documents" approach to cooperating with the government:

Helen Thomas, Christopher Hitchens, and being wrong

Posted on June 07, 2010
The forced retirement of Helen Thomas is further proof, if any were needed, that it's still unacceptable, in public discourse, to be wrong in one's opinions. I find that sad.

Some answers from AT&T on data pricing

Posted on June 06, 2010
I sent AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel some questions this morning:

Counterparties

Posted on June 05, 2010
Thomas Kinkade firm seeks bankruptcy protection -- LAT

That stubbornly high unemployment rate

Posted on June 04, 2010
No single datapoint -- not even the monthly payrolls report -- can in and of itself mark the beginning of the end of the recovery. But this month's numbers are still depressing, coming in well below lofty expectations, and having no silver lining: there were no upward revisions to previous months, there was no big fall in the unemployment rate, there was no obvious reason to believe that the 411,000 temporary employees hired in May to work on Census 2010 would otherwise have found private-sector employment.

Counterparties

Posted on June 04, 2010
Desmond Lachman has a very clear presentation on how bad Greece is, and how it affects the US -- AEI

The congestion charging debate

Posted on June 04, 2010
Here's the full video, in two parts. I fully intend to go into more detail about a few of the points raised, but for the time being, enjoy, and do post any questions in the comments.

Delaying Basel III

Posted on June 04, 2010
David Enrich and Damian Paletta have the latest news on the Basel III front, and the compromise seems to be coming into focus: not so much on the substance, which remains more or less intact, but rather on the timing, which could get pushed out as much as a decade.

The congestion pricing debate, cont.

Posted on June 04, 2010
I know a lot of people -- myself included -- don't have the time or inclination to watch videos online. So for those of you who didn't watch the full congestion pricing debate, here's a few highlights.

AT&T tries to defend its data pricing

Posted on June 04, 2010
Mark Siegel, the executive director of media relations at AT&T, was upset that I didn't phone him before posting my blog entry yesterday on his company's new data plans. He phoned me this morning, and I told him that I assumed the official AT&T press release -- which I linked to from my blog -- had all the information that the company wanted to release, but that if he wanted to tell me anything else, he was more than welcome to.

iPad advertising datapoint of the day

Posted on June 04, 2010
Andrew Vanacore spins a whole story out of one curious datapoint today: he says that on USA Today's iPad app, advertisers such as Marriott are paying "about $50 for every thousand times, or impressions, the ad appears", compared to less than $10 on the website.

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