Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

I Told You So

Robert Waldmann is pleased to note that he was right and that Paul Krugman and Joeseph Stiglitz were wrongggg. They claimed that PPIP was a huge giveaway, because purchases of toxic assets would be 85% financed by no-recourse loans from the FDIC. I noted that this financing would only be available if the FDIC (not […]

Wall Street Bailout comparison

… While it will be many years yet before we can put a hard number on the amount of taxpayer dollars actually lost in the bailout, the Center for Media and Democracy’s latest assessment of dollars disbursed in the bailout graphically illustrates the extraordinary lengths to which the federal government went to bailout the financial […]

AIG, Logic, Insanity, and Tim "I Saw Nothing" Geithner

Go read: If you’re only reading one post, see FT Alphaville, which incorporates and expands upon… Tom Adams and Yves Smith’s posting at Naked Capitalism discussing the document and the reality of the situtation. the document itself is available from either The Long Room or the Huffington Post. If the FRB of NY really believed […]

Would Have Been Hoisted from Comments Elsewhere

But Steve Randy Waldman already did the heavy lifting: several of the other officers had been stationed at the height of the housing bubble at facilities located near D.C. in Northern Virginia. They lived in very modest homes which were removed from their workplaces by substantial driving distances, but these homes were nevertheless particularly pricey […]

Are TBTF Banks Out of Danger? The Market Doesn’t Think So

Down here it’s just winners and losersAnd don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line This will be a long post. Even with all the pictures above the fold. It started with a finger exercise during my daughter’s swim team practice: Just in case you thought I was picking on The Big C […]

Much to My Amazement

UPDATE: It gets even stranger. The bankrupt-since-October-2008 Lehman Brothers is going to pay $50,000,000 in bonuses for this year. (h/t alea’s Twitter feed) It appears all of the “gosh, we really made a lot of money from bailing out rich bankers who socked it to their customers” rhetoric is having a small problem in the […]

Hoisted from Comments (thought not here)

UPDATE: D-Squared chimes in, saying in less than 100 words what took me a couple of thousand (though with no quotes): After the “first hundred days” in the term of a new Democratic President comes the next stage; the almost impreceptible transition among his supporters from saying “of course, he’s been hampered by all sorts […]

In Good News, the Race to the Bottom Got Harder

Remember the argument that we shouldn’t tax people because they’ll just move elsewhere? The British government appears not to believe it. Will the Geithner/Summers axis continue lying that “we can’t do that”? Since it really is a Windfall Profit, taxing it seems a reasonable idea. And now we won’t even be able to pretend that […]