Rdan Yves Smith describes a meeting she attended at Treasury in D.C. Read at her place or the rest under the fold. The Treasury invited a small group of bloggers for a “discussion” with senior officials on Monday. Initially, the meeting was to be background, which is a sort of journalistic “FYI but you can’t […]

by Linda Beale Part of the reason for our ongoing Great Recession is that we have had so many measures in the tax code to favor home ownership that (i) banks started to think of mortgage securitization business as money growing on trees and (ii) homeowners started to think of their homes as money-growing trees. […]

by cactus The Rule of Capture and Legalized Theft The rule of capture states that a resource belongs to the entity that, well, captured it, regardless of where that resource originated. In the US, it tends to apply to oil and natural gas development. What the rule of capture implies is that if you and […]

Mish sends us to “Track the Money,” recovery.gov’s breakdown of where funds have been sent and spent. He’s not happy, but I suspect he’s suffering the Jared Bernstein Problem: only looking at one side of the equation. But—and this is the key “but”—the reason it is right to do that is that ARRA money has […]

AIG is bankrupt, but Manchester United still wears their logo. However, when Dutch bank DSB Bank NV filed bankruptcy, Stephen Colbert had to step in to sponsor U.S. Speedskating? Maybe the Dutch understand Sports Economics and the Americans don’t?* *J.C. Bradbury, Dennis Coates, Skip Sauer, to name just three, would dissent from the last statement. […]

Paul Krugman argued that optimal fiscal policy in a liquidity trap targets unemployment equal to the non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). He uses a model with Ricardian equivalence. This means that the public debt does not affect consumption. When he wrote his post, I said I thought his conclusion depended on this assumption. […]

Robert Waldmann Don’t say you weren’t warned. I am trying to understand the effects of the switch from mechanically controlled machine tools to electronically controlled machine tools and then to digitally controlled machine tools. I don’t really know much about machine tools, but, then again, I don’t know much about firms or the business cycle […]

by Bruce Webb A lot of progressives insist that there is a simple golden-bullet solution to the health care crisis. All we need to do is substitute the 30 page HR676 Single Payer/Medicare For All bill for the 1990 page HR3962. Which led me to ask “How can you possibly supply code language to overhaul […]

Via Greg Mitchell’s Twitter feed, lying isn’t just for the IB branch any more: Goldman declined for three years to confirm their suspicions that it had bought their mortgages from a subprime lender, even after they wrote to Goldman’s then-Chief Executive Henry Paulson — later U.S. Treasury secretary — in 2003. Unable to identify a […]