Robert Waldmann This post about a post by Matthew Yglesias was, in part, motivated by a post by Ezra Klein on how he should’t care how many comments a post gets. I have noticed that posts with titles including either “soak the rich” or “Social Security” get lots of comments. I don’t want to horn […]
Robert Waldmann “All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of” [the universe] Note the placement of the close quotation mark and no peeking please. Adam Smith (1776) “The Wealth of Nations.” Book III Chapter 4.
Robert Waldmann Non-Standard Monetary Policy Robert Lucas on Non-Standard Monetary Policy 2008 A dead end? Not at all. The Fed can satisfy the demand for quality by using reserves — or “printing money” — to buy securities other than Treasury bills. This is the way the $600 billion got out into the private sector. This […]
Robert Waldmann The Kid has dropped his mask (he’s been hinting at this for years but … 95% !!!!) What if we had a 95 percent marginal tax rate on income over $10 million? What dire consequences would flow from this? Perhaps a certain outflow of top-flight baseball talent to Japan. But I don’t see […]
Robert Waldmann The USSR (Union of Serious Socialist Republicans or House GOP caucus) just came out in favor of nationalizing banks. From their alternative non budget [O]ur plan supports a process to address insolvent institutions that stops throwing good money after bad into failing institutions and places insolvent ones into temporary receivership. … For insolvent […]
Robert Waldmann I just read the pdf of Geithner’s new regulatory proposal. Generally pretty mild I’d say. Geithner is firmly of the view that firms should not be able to pick their regulators. He proposes a new regulator for “systemically important firms (rough definition like Lehman and AIG) which would decide which firms (including potentially […]
Robert Waldmann Ask Mr Obama. Criticisms of the Geithner plan (including mine) focus on the no recourse loans from the FDIC which give private partners of the Treasury an incentive to over pay for toxic legacy assets. In the plan as briefly described in a press release and interpreted here, there are two different programs. […]
Robert Waldmann is sooooo naive I have been asking “if the toxic sludge is so under-priced, why isn’t Warren Buffet buying it ?” Turns out that Mr Buffet had a better idea, get the US Treasury to pay him to buy it — he’s one of the inventors of the Geithner plan. the WaPo reported […]
Robert Waldmann A while ago I read a long article on AIG whose url I don’t remember. The story was the usual success -> hubris -> fall, but to me, one striking thing was that the success, the stuff AIG-FP did before going crazy, was mostly related to tax avoidance. In fact, they seem to […]
Robert Waldmann One of Mark Thoma’s links of the day is beyond awesome. Researchers report Experiments in the Brain Scanner A total of 24 subjects participated in the study which has just been published. Whilst recumbent in a scanner, they were called upon to solve simple problems. Success brought a financial reward. At the same […]