In one of the stupidest wastes of Treasury monies this month—a major accomplishment, though AIG hasn’t hit the trough again yet, so there might be hope—the Treasury wants to subsidize new mortgages (link to CR): Under the plan, Treasury would buy securities underpinning loans guaranteed by the two mortgage giants, which are temporarily under the […]

UPDATE: Credit where due category: H/T to Felix Salmon for pointing to this chart at bignose.org, which gives you borrowings relative to GDP. I often hate line graphs, especially when they include outliers that skew the axis, making it virtually unreadable. (This may be a result of seeing several papers this semester with Chilean/US$ exchange […]

There are three regular AB posters who currently are residents of the Great White North. So, naturally, it’s a Brooklyn boy who breaks the news that a plurality is not always a majority: The Liberals and New Democrats signed an agreement on Monday to form an unprecedented coalition government, with a written pledge of support […]

Brad DeLong suggested a bit before the U.S. election that there was virtually no non-political reason for NBER not to admit the United States was in a recession.* A little late, but they generally got it right. As Floyd Norris notes: The National Bureau of Economic Research said today that the current recession began a […]

UPDATE: For those who read here and not at CR, a link for Donations. We knew she was home with her family, but it was over the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday… Calculated Risk: Sad News: Tanta Passes Away: My dear friend and co-blogger Doris “Tanta” Dungey passed away early this morning. I would like to express […]

Ken Houghton CR beat me to commenting on this Mankiw whine post, partially because I couldn’t think of anything reasonable to say about it. (CR could. That’s why he gets the big bucks.) But now that CR has done the heavy lifting, let’s look at the other aspect: Mankiw’s standard: Based a standard ranking of […]

Following up to rdan’s two posts below (especially this one), an oldie but goodie:

Chris Dillow, beginning a post about legal avenues to reduce prostitution: If a man wants quick, unfulfilling sex with a woman who despises him, he should get married. The rest is one of Dillow’s usual rational exigeses of the vagaries of “rational” policy making. Tell me again about how Micro makes more sense than Macro.

Via CR, the Fed announcement this morning: The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday announced the creation of the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), a facility that will help market participants meet the credit needs of households and small businesses by supporting the issuance of asset-backed securities (ABS) collateralized by student loans, auto loans, credit […]

Via Felix, we discover Joe Nocera at the NYT reporting that securitization professionals are not as stupid as they would have had us believe: What [the FDIC] has discovered, said [Michael H. Krimminger, the F.D.I.C.’s special adviser to the chairman for policy], is that the contracts are rarely as constricting as investors and servicers have […]