I hesitated to post this one, but since Charlie Stross agrees about the implications, the rest of the world better hope we’re wrong:

Warren Buffett: [Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.

by cactus Is Obama Starting Poorly? One of the things that worried me about Obama was that he (like McCain) supported the ridiculous bail-out bill. As I noted when it passed, it wasn’t going to work, and the net effect would be this: shady, undeserving characters will be enriched, young versions of the idiots who […]

by reader Noni Mousa Gotta hide it better than that, NYT — “Judge Rules Against White House in E-Mail Case” New York Times Technology section? Yeah, that’s the place to slip in a seriously important political story. More In Technology * Judge Rules Against White House in E-Mail Case * Midway Games Reports Loss * […]

Thursday morning editorial: The voters may be full of hope about the looming Obama Presidency, but so far investors aren’t. No President-elect in the postwar era has been greeted with a more audible hiss from Wall Street. The Dow has lost 1,342 points, or about 14%, since the election, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq […]

Robert Waldmann is reading the article everyone is reading by Michael Lewis on what went wrong. My jaw just dropped. Long long ago, I wondered how bond rating agencies could be so powerful without being corrupted. For months I have wondered how they could get ratings so wrong (and assumed it wasn’t corruption). I’d guessed […]

Bailout Sleuth notes a discrepancy in the way we talk about the money for the bailout. What is up with this? The financial firms that were eligible for some of the loans through the Federal Reserve included many of the same firms that split $125 billion in the first round of the Treasury Department’s relief […]

Washington Post has an article on bailout oversight. In the six weeks since lawmakers approved the Treasury’s massive bailout of financial firms, the government has poured money into the country’s largest banks, recruited smaller banks into the program and repeatedly widened its scope to cover yet other types of businesses, from insurers to consumer lenders. […]

by Save the Rustbelt Title: The Big 3 Dilemma During the 80s I was an accounting and tax professor two days a week and a consultant three days a week. In cost accounting class I often used the Big 3 as examples of bad business models and disastrous labor contracts. All this in communities with […]

By Robert Waldmann Paul Krugman writes Max Baucus — Max Baucus! — is leading the charge on a health care plan that, at least at first read, is more like Hillary Clinton’s than Barack Obama’s; that is, it looks like an attempt at full universality. (The word I hear, by the way, is that Obama’s […]