Sometimes, Blog Posts Write Themselves: Cleaning up a hard drive of old files, I ran across these two articles from the middle of last year. First, the WSJ, arbiter of business sanity and purveyor of a positive meme whenever one is to be found, on 28 July 2007—nine months after the general supply of securitizable […]

Look no further than some of the brain-dead idiocy suggested as part of this NY Times poll of economists. Saddest quote of the day is from Andrew Samwick, who decided to be stupid the day the U.S. elected a non-Republican president: “If I had my druthers, the word ’stimulus’ would be expunged from public discussion, […]

Chris Dillow, beginning a post about legal avenues to reduce prostitution: If a man wants quick, unfulfilling sex with a woman who despises him, he should get married. The rest is one of Dillow’s usual rational exigeses of the vagaries of “rational” policy making. Tell me again about how Micro makes more sense than Macro.

Via Felix, we discover Joe Nocera at the NYT reporting that securitization professionals are not as stupid as they would have had us believe: What [the FDIC] has discovered, said [Michael H. Krimminger, the F.D.I.C.’s special adviser to the chairman for policy], is that the contracts are rarely as constricting as investors and servicers have […]

Geithner it is. I guess we can pretend he’s not a Clinton administration alum. And he has the right experience: Though not an economist, Mr. Geithner has a deep understanding of monetary and fiscal policy and broad experience in international trade issues. Before the current crisis, he was involved in the bailouts of Mexico, Indonesia, […]

Back in the Good Old Days, Leveraged Buyouts (LBOs) all the rage. Not coincidentally, the phrase “underfunded pension liabilities” moved into the mainstream. Long story short: when legislation is finally passed to make the “underfunded” portion a thing of the past (you can stop laughing any time), several large companies run by Captains of Industry—think […]

A depressing sentence from Daniel Gross (h/t Mark Thoma): The 13-F shows Harvard with some 231 positions worth nearly $2.9 billion, highly concentrated in popped macroeconomic bubble plays. We now have the title of the book about Henry Paulson’s time at Treasury: Popped Macroeconomic Bubble Plays.

While I’m trying to decide whether unmanaged funds are preferrable to mismanaged ones, and wondering whether any discussion of Mark Cuban (I like the picture better than CNN’s) belong here,* the NYT decides to continue its determined destruction of its reputation. Stanley Fish manages to forget—or, more accurately, ignore, since he mentions it in the […]

Via Dr. Black, the NYT quotes the Alabama Senator: “Companies fail every day and others take their place. I think this is a road we should not go down,” said Mr. Shelby, the senior Republican on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. “They’re not building the right products,” he said. “They’ve got good […]

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 […]