Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

The Best and the Brightest Meme — Eight Years Too Late?

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 […]

Quote of the Day (though from four days ago)

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.

English translation, or Kleptocracy Defined

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 […]

Shiela C. Bair Tries to Save the World–Again

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 […]

Open Thread II: Treasury Boogaloo

Geithner it is. I guess we can pretend he’s not a Clinton administration alum. And he has the right experience: Though not an economist, Mr. Geithner has a deep understanding of monetary and fiscal policy and broad experience in international trade issues. Before the current crisis, he was involved in the bailouts of Mexico, Indonesia, […]

Reasons to be Cheerful

Ken Houghton Christopher Buckley leads the Republican Party to water, and speculates on watching them sink: …GOP pin-up girl Sarah Palin. I’ll stipulate that that’s condescending, if my former confreres on the Right will stipulate that had Gov. Palin’s first name been “Bob” or “Chuck,” her surname would still be unrecognizable to 90 percent of […]

Everything Old is New Again

Back in the Good Old Days, Leveraged Buyouts (LBOs) all the rage. Not coincidentally, the phrase “underfunded pension liabilities” moved into the mainstream. Long story short: when legislation is finally passed to make the “underfunded” portion a thing of the past (you can stop laughing any time), several large companies run by Captains of Industry—think […]

There’s a reason Pimco hired the last leader away

A depressing sentence from Daniel Gross (h/t Mark Thoma): The 13-F shows Harvard with some 231 positions worth nearly $2.9 billion, highly concentrated in popped macroeconomic bubble plays. We now have the title of the book about Henry Paulson’s time at Treasury: Popped Macroeconomic Bubble Plays.

Non-Hormel Spam is also an Inferior Good, and there are also Inferior Enablers

Why Yahoo! e-mail may be worth using again, non-Jerry Yang edition: Security researchers, anti-spam groups and the whole security community in general were taken by surprise yesterday when reports of a sudden drop in junk mail activity started flowing in. This was the result of ISPs depeering McColo Corp., a U.S. based company offering web […]