Thursday morning editorial: The voters may be full of hope about the looming Obama Presidency, but so far investors aren’t. No President-elect in the postwar era has been greeted with a more audible hiss from Wall Street. The Dow has lost 1,342 points, or about 14%, since the election, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq […]
Ken Houghton There does indeed seem to have been a visible change in Treasury policy since the election. Until that point, it cared a little about optics. Now, it’s giving monster bailouts to the likes of AIG and American Express; it’s dragging its feet on homeowner relief; and in general Hank Paulson’s Wall Street buddies […]
Ken Houghton Not Veteran’s Day, which is a U.S. construction to make certain we don’t have to give another Federal holiday to Those Who Served. And arguably not Remembrance Day, the version here in Canada, since (as Rob[ert] Farley notes) there are “only” ten known survivors remaining of The War to End All Wars, which […]
Ken Houghton Consider this a bright, cheerful post, as opposed to my next one. As long as TAPPED is talking about “classism,” let’s recall that the easy solution was Common Knowledge by the early 1980s: When I was in school I ran with kid down the streetBut I watched him burn himself up on bourbon […]
Ken Houghton I would prefer not to talk about AIG, especially since we already have two posts on it today: Robert brilliantly puts it into context, while DOLB goes for blood. But the Gorgeous, Brilliant, and Talented BessNormally-not-this-astute-or-succinct Equity Private posted the perfect summary. And Floyd Norris is on fire as to why this move, […]
Ken Houghton Via Brad DeLong, we find Sheryl Sandberg trying to rehabilitate Lawrence Summers’s professional reputation with respect to women. She opens with: Larry has been a true advocate for women throughout his career. In 1992, as Chief Economist of the World Bank, Larry argued in front of the world’s Finance Ministers that the highest […]
I assume everyone heard about Starbucks offering a free cup of what they call coffee to anyone who went in on Tuesday and said they voted. Via a young woman who would probably prefer I not name her, a store in NYC went one better. (And the offers were non-rival.)
While there was a lot of blather about “values voters” swinging the 2004 Presidential election to the man who had none, the real story has always been that the HENRYs went for W’s policies. That changed in 2008: Guess who won Joe the Plumber’s vote…real people who make about $42,000 a year, the median income […]
Or does he know better? This year’s election coincided with an important moment in the financial crisis. The credit markets have stabilized in the last few weeks and even improved a bit. But the rest of the economy is deteriorating fairly rapidly. It’s now in danger of falling into a vicious spiral, in which spending […]
(hat tip to Jo Walton)