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Category Archives: Economics

Yet more bailout musings

Saturday, September 27, 2008

A friend passed along this article from Counterpunch, which I am in turn passing along, because it is always good to know that there’s at least one other person out there, with more paper credentials, that agrees with something you’ve said. In this case, it is my recent post arguing that if we are going […]

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Thinking about bailouts

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

One reason it’s not a good idea to pass a massive bailout without thinking is, tautologically speaking, because you don’t think about what you’re doing. That’s the essence of the Paulson plan, of course, to stop us from thinking-to make us react out of fear. And, as Matt Yglesias points out, another objective is to […]

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Heads we lose, tails we lose

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

A consensus appears to be emerging among the reality based that Paulson’s plan is to pay top dollar for the junk he wants to buy, since that’s the only way the “plan” to save the banks will work. If he paid what the stuff is worth, many of them would still be underwater. In other […]

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A few echoes and a modest proposal

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

The bad thing about being an evening blogger, particularly when things are moving fast, is that all the good observations are made before you get a chance to get in front of the keyboard. This is doubly so in the case of the bailout, because of the looking-glass nature of what’s going on out there. […]

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Random notes

Monday, September 22, 2008

This is one of those days in which things happen so fast it makes your head spin. I’ll confine myself to passing on some random observations. First, a point that seems obvious, upon reflection. Dean Baker points out that there must definitely be something wrong with a bailout proposal that has corporations clamoring to be […]

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2.5 Billion in bonuses to Lehman Brothers fat cats

Sunday, September 21, 2008

You truly couldn’t make this stuff up. (Via Americablog, via Naked Capitalism, via the UK Times Online: STAFF at Lehman’s New York office who helped to cause the world’s biggest corporate bankruptcy are to share in a $2.5 billion bonanza. The bonus, which has been described by London staff as a “scandal” has been pledged […]

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Doomed to repeat

Saturday, September 20, 2008

The full quote is “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. That aphorism should be much on the mind of folks like Chris Dodd. Here is the history. The Bush Administration screws something up big time or is caught breaking the law. Its response is to ask Congress to give it […]

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Protecting retirement

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Two videos for your edification. One in which Chris Matthews takes Congressman Eric Kantor (R) to the woodshed, and one in which ABC exposes McCain’s hypocrisy on economic issues. I’m posting them just for fun, but also to point out that in both, these Republicans argue about the fact that they are trying to save […]

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The meltdown continues

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

When I arrived home today I grabbed the front section of the New York Times, one of several that had been delivered while we were gone. I had already read part of the Times Reader edition this morning, so I quickly realized I was reading yesterday’s paper, and I was struck by how quickly the […]

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Phil Gramm, visionary creator of a coming depression.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

As I pointed out recently, I first wrote about “credit default swaps” in February, after becoming convinced that, though I don’t completely understand them (and maybe nobody does), that they are a bad thing indeed. In the post to which I’ve linked I noted that AIG, the big financial player that is probably going to […]

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