Robert Waldmann was working on a post about how financial innovation is profitable and pernicious. The ideas are that profitable new financial instruments are used to evade prudential regulations and to make financial markets more confusing so unsophisticated investors can be fleeced. Then I thought of a kind of financial innovation which might be profitable […]

Robert Waldmann had a post entitled “How did Lehman manage That?” asking how Lehman’s debt could sell for about ten cents on the dollar. A commenter told me I was confused and that Lehman’s accountants would have warned investors if there was anything, along the line of the things I imagined, lurking in their detailed […]

Robert Waldmann What isn’t going on in financial markets ? There are various theories of the financial crisis which suggest simple solutions and have the only defect that they are fantasies. 1) The only problem is mark to market accounting. Market prices for mortgage backed securities (MBS) are very low because of a panic. Banks […]

Robert Waldmann Looks like I should have put the post to which the post below links here. Thanks for clicking the link. I will try to add up by adding a point here. Sebastian Mallaby argues that deregulation did not cause the crisis, because hedge funds are regulated even less than investment banks. Based on […]

Robert Waldmann I wrote a post below on how economic theory as presented to the public and economic theory are very different. In particular, even given the standard super strong assumptions, economic theory does *not* imply that Laissez faire is the best policy, does not imply that market outcomes are even Pareto efficient (a very […]

Robert Waldmann I have a very low opinion of economic theory. I think that its survival is the result of a bait and switch where the core principles (roughtly Nash equilibrium) can’t be proven false, because they have no implications, and, given the fact that they have not been proven false, economists attempt to convince […]

Robert Waldmann notes a bit of financial news that must be read to be believed. Cliff105 who is between jobs and reading about the financial crisis receives an interesting bit of junk mail. a credit card offer from my recently failed bank, Washington Mutual. Normally, I throw these credit card offers into the recycle bin […]

Robert Waldmann is about to share his ignorance on banking, banking regulation, accounting, And accounting standards all in one post. You know the end is near when ordinary people get interested in accounting standards. A wide variety of politicians have decided that the problem with the US financial system is Mark to Market Accounting. It […]

Robert Waldmann OK what now ? Unless someone has just submitted a post, AngryBear doesn’t have a post on what to do now that the House Republicans (and some Democrats) have voted down the Paulson-Dodd-Frank bailout bill. The contingent consensus of the Left Blogosphere seems to have been to go for the Swedish solution if […]

Robert Waldmann A commenter over at naked capitalism notes that $110b of senior LEH debt went from trading .95 to .12 in a matter of days …. If you include the less senior debt that is trading at essentially zero, LEH had $110b hole in its balance sheet. And just days before this, the market […]