Robert Waldmann One brief question about structured finance and a possible answer. Why did investors need financial operators to make pools for them ? Now it is easier to make sense of financial intermediaries which pool than of those which pool and tranche. The obvious explanation is that an investor investing a small amount of […]

Robert Waldmann Still almost fishing from archives, but this time I think the version after the jump is maybe even less incoherant than the old version. Quite a lot of pooling and tranching has been done in the past decade. I think explanations of this fact offered by the tranchers can’t be accurate or at […]

Robert Waldmann Just to post about something other than health care reform, I will type my vague thoughts on financial regulation after the jump. Much is similar to stuff I posted when financial regulation was the hot topic. I want to take a long look at financiar regulation starting with generalities very far from possible […]

Robert Waldmann “Nobody else gets hurt if you buy a lousy mortgage pool,” Cochrane said. “The government doesn’t need to write a new rule every time someone buys a rotten tomato. Investors will demand the right amount of transparency, complexity, and risk-sharing – or monitoring of mortgage pools – unless they all get bailed out […]

Robert Waldmann I am not questioning Senator Olympia Snowe’s integrity. The Snowe job in question was my attempt to convince myself that Senator Snowe agrees with me. When reflecting on the question I discover that she strongly disagrees with Senator Snowe. I can see that the problem of health care reform has caused her to […]

Robert Waldmann I am trying to read John Cochrane’s comments on Paul Krugman’s article on why economists got it so wrong. I tend to get upset while reading. I have managed to get through the first paragraph in which Cochrane compares Krugman to someone who denies that HIV causes AIDS and compares developments in economics […]

Robert Waldmann I am actually commenting on a snippet with a useless link here. Professor Krugman’s article, like much of his journalism, was hastily drafted and factually incorrect. [skip] One of the most humorous aspects of the article was its view that the efficient markets hypothesis was at the heart of the inability to see […]

Robert Waldmann I can’t believe this “Illegal Immigrants Could Not Buy Insurance on New ‘Exchange,’ White House Says” So a rude idiot shouts “you lie” and Obama decides he has to punish undocumented aliens. This is not about subsidies which were clearly not on offer yesterday. This is about making it harder for them to […]

Robert Waldmann In response to a critical comment, I have decided to actually read the article which I stopped reading when it said the Journal of Monetary Economics was a must publish journal for young economists. Ryan Grim asserts that economists don’t criticize the Fed because the Fed has bought control of the economics profession.I […]

Robert Waldmann It appears that the worst tax ever TM is the brainchild of the normally sane Olympia Snowe. How could a sensible intelligent person come up with such a terrible idea ? What is wrong with the leaky bucket metaphor for the economics of redistribution ?What is the leaky bucket metaphor for the economics […]