Bailout Bill, With Benefits for Student Lenders, Passes Congress Washington — The U.S. House of Representatives today passed the $700-billion financial-system bailout bill that was approved on Wednesday by the Senate. The plan would let the federal government ease credit markets by purchasing bank assets, involving primarily mortgages but also other types of assets, including […]

by reader ilsm Don’t ask, don’t tell: whether anything in DoD is worth the expense of scarce national resources. Read GAO Testimony: Fundamental Changes Are Needed to Improve Weapon Program Outcomes In 2000 the defense acquisition portfolio was: 75 programs with planned commitments of $790B, increases from planned R&D of 27% and average schedule delay […]

Stormy noted that Wells Fargo’s bill is based in part on “exploiting a presumed tax loophole.” I forgot to ask the question one should always ask when confronted with a Chess Ending problem, “What was the move before?” In this case, we know (from A C Shareholder’s comment) that Wells had been discussions to purchase […]

A detail of tax law makes all the difference in Stormy’s post below. Buy the whole thing, get the tax break. Buy part of it, you don’t.* The other half of the answer is that “timing is everything.” And playing Chicken with the FDIC often has Unintended Consequences.** So let’s turn the continuous-not-discrete timeline details […]

One of the few reasons that the Washington Post should still be in business: Previous editions indicated and linked here.

Almost a week ago—a few decades of Internet time, when people could still believe House Republicans might be sane—Brad DeLong quoted the summary: To provide authority for the Federal Government to purchase certain types of troubled assets for the purposes of providing stability to and preventing disruption in the economy and financial system and protecting […]

Dr. Black’s detection of Sadly No’s logical fallacy appears to have been addressed: PALIN: I feel so alive! Let’s grab my gay friend and go shoot wolves from the safety of a helicopter.

Driving fatalities significantly increase around Election Day.

Unemployed persons (seasonally adjusted) appears to be approaching 10,000,000. The other interesting thing about the table is that December 2007 now looks as if it was much worse than was reported at the time: another piece of data that might indicate that we have been in a recession since Q4 2007.

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 […]