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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

While I’m trying to decide whether unmanaged funds are preferrable to mismanaged ones, and wondering whether any discussion of Mark Cuban (I like the picture better than CNN’s) belong here,* the NYT decides to continue its determined destruction of its reputation. Stanley Fish manages to forget—or, more accurately, ignore, since he mentions it in the […]

Via Dr. Black, the NYT quotes the Alabama Senator: “Companies fail every day and others take their place. I think this is a road we should not go down,” said Mr. Shelby, the senior Republican on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. “They’re not building the right products,” he said. “They’ve got good […]

Everyone should read Joe Wilcox’s update, based on the release of more court docs, on the ongoing saga of Why Vista Sucked on Release. (Short version: because Intel asked.) Teaser quote, which would look fine in Mankiw or Krugman’s next Macro text: Based on the available information, I come to an easy conclusion: One monopoly […]

I hesitated to post this one, but since Charlie Stross agrees about the implications, the rest of the world better hope we’re wrong:

Warren Buffett: [Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.