Robert Waldmann In a particularly silly op-ed Sebastian Mallaby argued that deregulation wasn’t the cause of the financial crisis and presented as evidence the fact that hedge funds, which are regulated even less than investment banks, are doing fine. Of course the reason that there wasn’t a run on hedge funds is that investors can’t […]

Robert Waldmann was working on a post about how financial innovation is profitable and pernicious. The ideas are that profitable new financial instruments are used to evade prudential regulations and to make financial markets more confusing so unsophisticated investors can be fleeced. Then I thought of a kind of financial innovation which might be profitable […]

The Nigerians appear to be back, sending me the same e-mail as before, clearly in desperation: My Friends, I hope you’ll take the time today to read the email below from Governor Palin. I guess everyone else had my reaction. (As an aside, am I the only one who sees “My Friends” at the opening […]

Ms. mochi-tsuki discovers that the Washington Post has no copyeditors and cannot do math. If this were another blog, I would be typing “Why, oh why, can’t we have a better press corps” here. Instead, let’s just leave it at: if you can’t extract data from the census correctly, what are you doing publishing a […]

by Bruce Webb From Newsweek’s The Stumper (h/t slinkerwink’s diary at dKos) Okay nobody expected Sarah Palin to be the sharpest political crayon in the box, but surely someone on the McCain/Palin team has looked at a political cartoon over the last hundred plus years plus and understands the whole donkey/elephant deal. This ain’t advanced […]

at Erin’s place. Tom puts an end to the “oh, they were just mistakes” tax argument: The thing about [Sarah Palin taking her spouse and especially her kids with her on business trips]…is that the attempt to edit the terms of the trips after the fact could be seen as evidence of intent to commit […]

by cactus Reading Between the Lines of an Excuse Here’s a story you probably already heard. The Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August. According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began […]

rdan Here for your consideration is a private company made up of defense contractors running city governments in the state of Georgia, USA. Privatized Cities — When the government of the city of Sandy Springs in Georgia decided to bring in a multinational corporation to run all of the city’s services – with the exception […]

Late to the party, but FelixMatthew Malone (via The Divine Bess) quotes from Andrew Lahde’s good-bye letter, the follow-up to the one in which he noted that he only plays fair games, and the Fed is currently rigging the roulette wheel, so he’s taking his 800%+ return from last year and going home. This ‘graf […]

rdan Potability, Politics, and PipesBy David ZetlandA Guest Post (Freakonomics) In 2000, the United Nations declared an intention to reach eight Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) — each with one or more targets — by 2015. The MDG’s are attracting a lot of money, but money can’t fix everything. Since I’m a water guy, I’ll explain […]