Via Brad DeLong, I see Time magazine has identified the “25 people to ‘blame’ for the financial crisis.” [my sarcastic quotes on blame; Time appears to be serious] Amazingly, none of TWX’s (mostly former) top management—who pushed LBOs in the 1980s and Internet bubbles in the 1990s—makes on the list. More amazingly, Lew Ranieri is […]

I believe this is also how the Laffer Curve was created on Dick Cheney’s napkin: I thought about calling this “Why Tom Toles will never be hiring by the current mismanagement at Time magazine,” but that would be cruel.

Ken Houghton notes that no one has stolen my ID or shifted my sense of politics or the economy. Brad DeLong has been running excerpts from the February 2009 Vanity Fair “Oral History” of the Bush White House. Time and priorities being what they are, I didn’t get a chance to read the whole piece […]

Suppose I told you that there was a crisis with a stock, say, GE. That the price of the stock had dropped around 75% in the past year. And you responded, “But the problem is solved; the prices of long-term Call Options (say, the January 2011 20s) has gone up, as has their Open Interest. […]

The idea that they aren’t inviting Yves, CR, and Roubini onto the calls either led me to wonder for a moment if there was another factor in the invitations. But skipping Felix, even if he is a short-timer, means that they weren’t judging by the blog in the first place.

UPDATE: Dr. Black twists the knife. The Geithner Plan FAQ is worth reading; it’s a classic example of treating an incomplete market as if it were the entire market. And note that “skin in the game” is limited to a part of the local pool. Unfortunately, while Treasury plays in the wading pool, hedge funds […]

Brad DeLong has the breakdown of things taken out of the no-longer-possible-to-defend-as-stimulating stimulus bill. Nice to see that no Republican, and precious few Democratic Senators, believe in following even Andrew Samwick’s tepid endorsement: Congress and the Obama Administration should be very discriminating in what they will spend money on. Bailout money for banks and large […]

DeLong body-slams Mankiw. Especially like this: Mankiw: The CEA website should also post a notice about CEA internships, as we had during my tenure as CEA chair, so students can find out how to apply. DeLong: “Let me, for one, state that I am very glad that Christie Romer has been too busy since her […]

Robert Waldmann Brad DeLong boldly attempts to exhaustively list the factors which can affect the value of a fixed income asset. This is some Mac generated i document and I can’t cut and paste. Go here and search for “there are four”. The four are called “default”, “the safe real interest rate”, “risk”, and adverse […]

Brad DeLong suggested a bit before the U.S. election that there was virtually no non-political reason for NBER not to admit the United States was in a recession.* A little late, but they generally got it right. As Floyd Norris notes: The National Bureau of Economic Research said today that the current recession began a […]