Alea notes TAF results: Total propositions submitted: $138.092 billionTotal propositions accepted: $138.092 billionBid/cover ratio: 0.92 Number of bidders: 71 The auction in question was supposed to be a $150B, 85-day auction to get firms through year-end. (For contrast, the last 84-day [12 week] auction had a bid-to-cover of 1.27.) Clearly, all the firms that are […]

UPDATE: Brad DeLong notes that there is no requirement, under the bailout bill, for halfway measures and delays: Every other country that is in this business is nationalizing the banks and injecting capital into them. Only the United States is operating on the asset side along. It’s unlikely to work, and Neel is now responsible. […]

Ken Houghton Or at least optimistic. McCain is going after Medicare and Medicaid. But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Sen. McCain’s senior policy adviser, said Sunday that the campaign has always planned to fund the tax credits, in part, with savings from Medicare and Medicaid. Those government health-care programs serve seniors, poor families and the disabled. Medicare spending […]

Stormy noted that Wells Fargo’s bill is based in part on “exploiting a presumed tax loophole.” I forgot to ask the question one should always ask when confronted with a Chess Ending problem, “What was the move before?” In this case, we know (from A C Shareholder’s comment) that Wells had been discussions to purchase […]

A detail of tax law makes all the difference in Stormy’s post below. Buy the whole thing, get the tax break. Buy part of it, you don’t.* The other half of the answer is that “timing is everything.” And playing Chicken with the FDIC often has Unintended Consequences.** So let’s turn the continuous-not-discrete timeline details […]

One of the few reasons that the Washington Post should still be in business: Previous editions indicated and linked here.

Almost a week ago—a few decades of Internet time, when people could still believe House Republicans might be sane—Brad DeLong quoted the summary: To provide authority for the Federal Government to purchase certain types of troubled assets for the purposes of providing stability to and preventing disruption in the economy and financial system and protecting […]

Dr. Black’s detection of Sadly No’s logical fallacy appears to have been addressed: PALIN: I feel so alive! Let’s grab my gay friend and go shoot wolves from the safety of a helicopter.

Driving fatalities significantly increase around Election Day.

Unemployed persons (seasonally adjusted) appears to be approaching 10,000,000. The other interesting thing about the table is that December 2007 now looks as if it was much worse than was reported at the time: another piece of data that might indicate that we have been in a recession since Q4 2007.