By Noni Mausa Wiggle Room In a claustrophobic economy where the lions share of the fruit of citizens’ efforts is funneled to a small number of beneficiaries, where institutions intended to intervene on their behalf have been rejigged to work backwards, what can the little guy do to gain some wiggle room? The poorest Americans […]
I wasn’t going to mention Melissa Mia Hall’s death here—this is economics and politics, not sf—but now it is clear that, as usual, there is an overlap: If she had seen the doctor, most likely he would have suspected more than a pulled muscle and would have ordered a life-saving EKG. As Texas lawyer, writer […]
The opening chapter of Jack Cashill’s Popes and Bankers relates his version of the tale of Melonie Griffith-Evans, a woman who in 2004 borrowed her way to losing her house. Ms. Griffith-Evans accepted loans in order to buy a house priced at $470,000 that resulted in her having to pay “roughly $3,500 a month.” Of […]
First, David Leonhardt argued that this recession was good for workers. Now, Floyd Norris apparently has decided to mix and match data. (I wonder if the fact many NYT employees who are looking at their 45-day severance offers is having an effect on its economic coverage.) One of the standard “economist jokes” is about the […]
I try to like the NYTimes Economics Reporting. I really do. Heck, any place that publishes Uwe Reinhardt can’t be all bad. But David Leonhardt, as he does often enough that I hesitate to read his work, again goes beyond the pale today, and clearly does so deliberately. The offending paragraph: Twenty-two months after the […]
Robert Waldmann One brief question about structured finance and a possible answer. Why did investors need financial operators to make pools for them ? Now it is easier to make sense of financial intermediaries which pool than of those which pool and tranche. The obvious explanation is that an investor investing a small amount of […]
Robert Waldmann I’m not kidding. Someone in some thread said that he or she thought it would be great if I could give a simple intuitive explanation of Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis (1985). Also I would get an interesting perspective on the crisis if I could fly to the moon. I will try after the jump. […]
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has a topic we should be keeping an eye on over time, as does CR. Bloomberg now suing in court under the Freedom of Information Act for aggregate information concerning types of collateral being used for collateral with the $1.5 trillion authorized by Congress. The books from Treasury are being […]