CT Blue

If you’ve been reading Paul Krugman’s column, and more especially, his blog, you know that he has been decrying the fact that the G-20 countries have embarked on an austerity drive, just when running up deficits is precisely what the doctor ordered. Here’s his latest. It does seem counterintuitive to think that you can get […]

Well, according to the Treasury, we taxpayers have now been fully repaid for all those Tarp loans. But it’s important to note that those loans were basically interest free, and in fact the banks made money on them. How? Well, the interest the Treasury charged was so low as to be non-existent, so the banks […]

Although I never wrote about it, I remember thinking at the time that nationalizing the banks was being discussed that it would not be a bad idea to have a permanent national bank of some sort to keep the private banks honest, much like the late lamented health care public option might have kept the […]

Perhaps our first mistake was believing that a regulator who did not believe in regulation was an indispensable man. Alan Greenspan has now decided that maybe, after all, the government has a role in regulating the economic system. I’m no economist, but I do have a degree in history from a relatively elite college, so […]

Gretchen Morgenstern, the Times’ excellent business reporter,exposes another as yet unexploded credit default swap bomb, this time close to home. Seems that many municipalities have issued credit default swaps in connection with municipal bonds. In theory, the swaps allowed the municipalities to pay a slightly lower rate of interest, but that happy outcome, as elsewhere, […]