rdan Special Inspector General Barofsky and his team make particular note of the lack of oversight in TARP, and also worry that hedge funds are even more opaque in other trillion dollar programs. The SIGTARP team did its own survey and received reasonable, but uneven, reporting by banks eventhough Treasury said it would be too […]

rdan 24/7 Wallstreet suggests AIG might pay back much of the money lent to it by Uncle Sam (#11). Is this notion really in the cards for the taxpayer?? AIG (AIG) may be the only large company in America that both the management and federal government want torn apart. If AIG succeeds in selling most […]

rdan(response to cactus, lifted from comments, by juan. Slightly edited for readability)) ‘Favoritism’ seems too kind while also continuing to assume legal-political institutions [‘the state’] to be dominant rather than dominated, which is then to avoid the question of which class or class segment dominates through the mediation of ‘the state’. Willem Buiter put it […]

rdan Consider the Evidence and Crooked Timber April 16-18, 2009 post a series by Lane Kenworthy on income inequality. Our own Robert Waldmann has thoughts of his own as well. How to pay for inequality reduction: follow-upApril 20, 2009 One way to make some progress in reducing income inequality is to significantly increase redistributive transfers […]

rdan(hat tip ronin 8317…A very good paper by John Geanakoplos on the leverage cycle..) John Geanakoplos on the leverage cycle At least since the time of Irving Fisher, economists, as well as the general public, have regarded the interest rate as themost important variable in the economy. But in times of crisis, collateral rates (equivalently […]

by cactus Forbes and the “Self-Made” Label I’m kinda busy these days, but this topic is small pet peeve of mine: what the heck is up with Forbes and the “self-made” label? On occasion, I’ve gone through the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans and marveled at who Forbes manages to decide qualifies as self-made. […]

by cactus The Bail-Out as Class Warfare The argument for bailing out AIG essentially amounted to this: Goldman, Welfare, Queen & Sachs the counterparties need to be helped. I don’t have much sympathy for this argument. See, about a decade ago, my sister had a small business exporting cosmetics from the US to South America. […]

by cactus Megan McArdle Knows Galileo Was Waaay Over-rated As many long-time readers know, I’m working (with a co-author) on a book that looks at a bunch of different series – from abortion to crime to the unwed motherhood – and how they evolved over the administrations from Ike to GW. Since both I and […]

rdan Well, there you go. And all that fuss for naught. (bolding is mine) Time CNN declares: Investors find it disconcerting to see the stocks in the huge financial institutions that are at the foundation of the global capital system trading up and down 25% a day, and, in some cases trading in the pennies. […]