The battle over credit and debit card “swipe fees” that has been raging on Capitol Hill for the past 5 years will be heating up again soon. The credit card industry makes $125 million a day in swipe fees, so it is obvious why they are fighting to protect this “secret tax” on consumers and […]

This alone was worth the trip! Lord Adair Turner, Chairman of the FSA

Robert Waldmann Is Jim Puzzangera of the Los Angeles Times insinuating what I think he’s insinuating ? Before Washington Mutual collapsed … its executives knowingly created “a mortgage time bomb” by steering borrowers to subprime mortgages and turning the loans into securities the company knew were likely to go bad…“At times, WaMu selected and securitized […]

by Marshall Auerback, Fellow and Contributor to the Roosevelt Institute’s New Deal 2.0 Marshall Auerback warns that Germany’s obsession with a defense against the external threat of inflation is blinding them to the real risks facing Europe. The Maginot Line, named after French Minister of Defense André Maginot, was a line of defenses which France […]

Lifted from comments. Vtcodger summarizes his thoughts on a layman’s approach to trade and trade policy: 1. It’s pretty clear that there is no protocol for determining if a currency is under or over valued relative to another or by how much. It’s all guesswork. 2. Foreign Exchange probably is not a marketplace that is […]

The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) hosted its inaugural conference this weekend at King’s College Cambridge, an experiment of sorts. I had the pleasure of attending the conference, my first time to Cambridge. John Maynard Keynes wrote his *General Theory* at King’s College. And as if that wasn’t enough, I dined with blogging legends, […]

China’s March trade deficit Patrick Chovanec on Seekingalpha asks the basic question on the direction Chinese policy makers will take regarding the currency question, but the underlying question remains unanswered… What tipped this month’s figure from a marginal surplus to a deficit was a surge in imports, up 66% from last year. But it’s going […]

Lifted from comments. Before they cut our paid for stuff, I think we need to “Audit the Government”. Not sure if anyone in Congress, Treasury, or Federal Reserve is up to the task. As far as the annual budget goes, I always see those pie charts where they make SS, Medicare and Medicaid look like […]

Robert Waldmann Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein come very close to accusing Alec Litowitz of the Magnetar hedge fund of being a financial arsonist. I have been speculating about financial arson for a year and a half now. The hypothesis is that Magnetar deliberately set up especially low quality CDOs and bought CDS insurance on […]

by Bruce Webb Well this is a response to a question in the Rivlin thread. There are widespread misunderstandings about what if anything makes up the “IOUs” in the Trust Funds, with many people thinking they just have artificially low rates (and so obviously underperforming theoretical private accounts) or just are open-ended loosey-goosy commitments to […]