rdan Well, there you go. And all that fuss for naught. (bolding is mine) Time CNN declares: Investors find it disconcerting to see the stocks in the huge financial institutions that are at the foundation of the global capital system trading up and down 25% a day, and, in some cases trading in the pennies. […]

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. […]

McGill University Macroeconomics Comprehension Exam, May 2003, Question 10 (Essay): The stock market bubble burst in the spring of 2000. The popular pres now talks about a housing bubble, referring to ever rising prices of houses in North America (and elsewhere). They say that if the housing bubble bursts it will have a much more […]

A heartfelt congratulations to the United State of Georgia (from whose namesake “University of” I got my Finance MBA), which today passed California in the battle for Most Failed Banks (9 v 8) in the past year. In fairness, California did not have a failure until July, while Georgia waited until August. The two states […]

Reality (h/t Dr. Black): In certain ZIP codes in places like Homestead and Florida City, around 25 percent of the homes are in one stage of foreclosure or another. Countless others were built by developers and sit vacant in ghostly subdivisions, with not a buyer in sight. In the days after Andrew, then-Dade County Emergency […]

This is why we don’t believe the bailout will work the way you think it will (i.e., to increase lending): Recently, securities rated AAA have changed hands for roughly 30 cents on the dollar, and most of the buyers have been hedge funds acting opportunistically on a bet that prices will rise over time. However, […]

Via Instaputz, an explanation of why stealing tax dollars in order to decouple securities from the assets they are allegedly securitizing is A Really Stupid Idea, presented directly, yet also in a way an econometrician wiill understand.

Following up on Robert’s post (he started later and finished earlier): Dr. Black: [T]he idea that all this came about simply because the banksters decided a bit of extra risk was good is an idea only a macro finance person could sanely entertain. All right, I represent that remark in more ways than one. So […]

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 […]