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Category Archives: Economics

Sound business plan

Friday, May 9, 2008

This is in the beating a dead horse category, but even I am stunned by the monumental stupidity of the folks at General Motors. At least they’re consistent. They just couldn’t see the gas crunch coming, so they just built more and more SUVs. And who would ever have thought that they could go wrong […]

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Outrage, outrage everywhere

Sunday, April 20, 2008

The New York Times broke a major story today, even if it does fit into the “what else is new” category into which so much news can be placed. Is anyone remotely surprised that the military experts on television are spewing administration talking points in the service of their current employers, arms dealers and the […]

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More nonsense from the Senate

Monday, April 7, 2008

“There are two things you will never wish to watch: the making of sausage and the making of legislation.” The above has apparently been variously attributed, but no matter who said it, it was a base canard against all the honorable sausage makers out there. I commented before on the Senate’s foreclosure prevention bill, which […]

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Another incentive for past conduct

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Just got back from Drinking Liberally, where one of my fellow drinkers pointed out that the Senate is following in the footsteps of the Groton Town Council by incentivizing past behavior. You may recall that the town of Groton gave a hotel developer a tax break as an incentive to build a hotel it had […]

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Expelled

Friday, March 28, 2008

Regular readers of the excellent blog Pharyngula can stop right here. For the rest of you folks, I must bring you up to date on a controversy brewing in the ongoing wars between scientists and crackpots over evolution. It has been covered extensively at Pharyngula, whose blogmeister, PZ Meyers, world renowned atheist and biologist, was […]

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Mind Boggling

Friday, March 28, 2008

According to MSNBC the nations investment banks are borrowing an average of 32.9 billion dollars a day from the Fed. I think even nowadays that’s a lot of money. The total proposed budget for the state of Connecticut for the fiscal year 2009 is about 18.4 billions, which means that the banks are borrowing a […]

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“Moving paper fantasy” hits real wall

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Last month I mentioned an article I read about “credit default swaps”, another off the books sort of financial chicanery that might be lurking in the background ready to cause financial havoc. These are, as best as a I understand, freely tradable credit “insurance policies”, which, for the holders, amount to bets that insured loans […]

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Who would have thought it

Monday, March 17, 2008

From the LA Times: Freelance financial watchdogs who examined the paperwork on sub-prime home loans being sold to Wall Street had an inside view of the boom in easy-money lending this decade. The reviewers say they raised plenty of red flags about flaws so serious that mortgages should have been rejected outright — such as […]

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The Cassandra Effect

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Paul Krugman has a blog, and today he takes note of a phenomenon that is, unfortunately, not confined to economic prognostication: Dean Baker is mad at Robert Rubin for suggesting that “few, if any” people saw the financial meltdown coming. I’d say that there are two levels to this. First, a lot of people — […]

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Designed to fail

Friday, March 14, 2008

A guiding principle of the conservative faith is that government fails at all it tries to do. When they get in power, they prove that theory in spades, at least for times when they are in power. The latest example from the New York Times: After months of watching a growing credit crisis made worse […]

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