Robert Waldmann I don’t know anything about finance. Taking my advice on how to invest would be like tacking Moody’s universe of rated corporate bonds to the wall, throwing darts at it and buying the bond immediately to the right and below the dart and repeating 100 times. I know this, because that is exactly […]

Robert Waldmann OK so no one is interested in my big bad asset bank which requisitions all MBS and CDOs and pays in shares proportional to revenue generated recently (won’t even bother with the link). I have a new plan. The Treasury wants to bring private investors in to help it buy CDOs and such. […]

Robert Waldmann The logic of the new Geithner plan is that CDO’s can be bought for less than their hold to maturity value because of panic and the fact that most huge players have cash flow problems. Thus the logic is that a calm investor whose mood does not swing with the mood of the […]

Robert Waldmann via Atrios How The Gamblers See Things George Stephanopoulos from twitter: Early read on Geithner plan from plugged in investment source asset managers he knows just won’t play until sure WH can control Congress See that’s the cost of acting from anger. The Obama administration is offering asset managers a chance to play […]

rdan Reuters carries a story on the continued use of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency: A U.N. panel will next week recommend that the world ditch the dollar as its reserve currency in favor of a shared basket of currencies, a member of the panel said on Wednesday, adding to pressure on […]

cross posted with Howard Richman of Trade and Taxes We should be fighting a trade war with China, not Mexico Country U.S. Exports 2008 U.S. Imports 2008 Export/Import Ratio Mexico $176.2 billion $235.3 billion .75 China $87.4 billion $347.9 billion .25 In the 2009 appropriations bill, just signed by President Obama, Congress terminated the pilot […]

Robert Waldmann Tilman Tacke and I are quite cautious in this paper which does not support my pet theory described in this paper. The stylized fact (which has returned after a brief absence from the data) is that, given the income of poorer quintiles, where the rich are richer more babies die. My pet theory […]

h/t Movie Guy CBO Preliminary Analysis (PDF) For your reading and commenting pleasure. I would only note that much of the change between the CBO January baseline and today is just the result of scoring the intervening legislation and not due to any unexpected economic changes. But in any case here it is. Update: here […]

My Loyal Reader notes that the economic survival of Zimbabwe’s current government is now largely dependent on sin taxes: As he presented his revised 2009 budget to parliament, Finance Minister Tendai Biti noted that “indirect taxes made up of customs and excise duty have contributed 88 percent of government revenue, which means that the government […]