Here’s what Happens When I Click a Link by Accident: Does anyone believe the market rate for taxi drivers in Maryland is $11.41 an hour? The base salary for an Assistant Professor of Economics is $115-120K for elite schools (well, Harvard and Stanford, but you get the idea).* Morgan Stanley offered $85,000 for an Analyst […]

sc, commenting at Alea on September 24th, was much better: How to play this to make money? GLD and SKF (if it starts behaving properly) and OTM [out of the money] puts on C, BAC, WB. That last is WalkAllOverYa, which is either WFC or Big C bound, depending on time of day, phase of […]

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 […]

By Divorced one like Bush ”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out […]

by cactus Ranking Presidents on Real Economic Growth – The Definitive List As we get closer to election time, the level of invective seems to be going up. What I find interesting is how the intersection between that invective, general ignorance, and outright charlatanism. For example, mention of FDR is cropping up a lot in […]

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 […]

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 makes a case refuting Mallaby on deregulation. James Galbraith responds to Mallaby on deregulation as well (hat tip Economist’s View )

by cactus Two Frauds, and Preventing Another Actually, a lot of things are obvious to people with the information, but are best ignored. Back in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, a bunch of really smart guys from the big American banks were making huge loans to dictatorships in South America. They knew damn well […]