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 […]
Following up on this post, a 4-week auction over year-end (PDF) that sold at 0.00% interest, with a coverage ratio of 4.4:1. (Yield unchanged from the previous week, and the week before that.) Who could see Looming Inflation in this? See next post.
Rahm Emanuel accidentally Tells the Truth and Shames the Devil: “We have to get them off the sidelines and get them to play a more active role in our economic recovery,” Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said on Sunday. “They play an essential role in helping the economy grow.” Gosh, the Administration […]
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 […]
Charlie Stross talks about liquidity: What we’ve just seen, hidden in the euphemism here, is a confession that drug cartels and other organized criminals have gone on a $352Bn asset-buying spree — and the banks and regulators, world-wide, turned a blind eye to this because the alternative was to allow the banks to collapse. And […]
Not only did the U.S. Treasury just sell $29 Billion worth of four-week bills at par (i.e., they got $29 Billion for them, and will return $29 Billion on 29 December), but the bid to cover ratio was over 5:1 (pdf link; had $154B in bids for $29B in securities). This is down 0.06% from […]
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 […]
NYT headline: Audit Finds TARP Program Effective. Paragraph six of the same article: The Treasury’s lack of clarity about the program’s goals, the oversight panel said, made it hard to assess its overall effectiveness. Mr. Geithner is scheduled to testify on Thursday in his quarterly appearance before the five-member panel. [emphasis mine] Clearly. one of […]
While Henry and Brad DeLong noted some more silly prattling from a brain-dead economist, AB readers and those wanting to maintain their sanity* will prefer The New Decembrists, and new blog from The Epicurean Dealmaker and, presumably, others. Worth it for TED’s Reformist Manifesto alone. *I do not necessarily assume that either of these sets […]
Larry Summers’s Village Idiot: I was too right to give them EVERYTHING! And now they’re being MEAN to me.