Skip to content

Category Archives: Economics

Hillary predicts the future-badly.

Friday, March 7, 2008

Hillary Clinton committed a cardinal sin recently by implying, if not stating outright, that John McCain would be a better president than Barack Obama. I’m not going to add my voice to everyone else who has come down on her, though she deserves every denunciation. What no one has noticed is the fact that, if […]

Also filed in Presidential Politics | | Comments (1)

Simple solutions

Monday, February 18, 2008

Matt Berger passed along this article to those of us on his email list, in which the argument is made that subprime mortgages should be banned. I am usually wary of simple solutions, but in the case of subprime mortgages, I really think the problem would be solved if a lender were barred from selling […]

Also filed in | | Comments (0)

Another economic mess coming

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Yet another unregulated and bizarre type of financial device about to fall apart. They are called “credit default swaps”. Reading about this stuff makes my head hurt, but as I understand it, these are “insurance” instruments whereby the buyer, seeking protection, purchases insurance to protect the buyer in case underlying corporate bonds default. Both they […]

Also filed in | | Comments (0)

Poor George, people are ignoring his economic miracle

Monday, January 28, 2008

We adjourned our Charter Revision Commission early enough to allow for members to watch the State of the Union. I’m no masochist, so I won’t be tuning in. In fact, I’ll soon be turning in, because I’m dead tired. But I did want to point out this very interesting phenomenon, which Dean Baker points out […]

Also filed in Media | | Comments (0)

Too rich to fail

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Query: should it make us feel better to know that the folks in the bottom 99% of the top 1% sometimes take a hit quite like that we bottom 99ers so often take from them? (Can you follow that?) In today’s Times we learn that the guys most directly responsible for losing billions at the […]

Also filed in | | Comments (0)

Bush speaks, the market plunges

Friday, January 18, 2008

Yesterday I mentioned that my wife speculated that the market downturn may be related to foreign investors taking their money to greener pastures. Turns out that she was may have been right, at least according to Paul Krugman: The story has played itself out time and time again over the past 30 years. Global investors, […]

Also filed in Bush | | Comments (0)

Oooh, that hurts

Thursday, January 17, 2008

The stock market fell 300 points today. Whenever a Republican is in office I feel a secret pleasure when I hear bad economic news, since it increases the chances for removing those Republicans. Some things are more important than money, though few Republicans would agree. Oddly enough, when the Democrats are in the White House, […]

Also filed in Politics | | Comments (1)

Silly me

Sunday, January 13, 2008

A few days ago I wrote a post implying that Bank of America was committing yet another subprime folly in buying Countrywide. Turns out nothing could be further from the truth. As John Aravosis points out at Americablog, it’s all just a clever way of getting the American taxpayer to subsidize the losses. The trick […]

Also filed in | | Comments (1)

Yet another thing no one could anticipate

Friday, January 11, 2008

Wouldn’t you think PR people would avoid the “Nobody anticipated…” formulation made famous by Condi Rice about terrorists and echoed by Bush about Katrina? Apparently not, as Floyd Norris reports in today’s New York Times (Banks Plead They Can’t Follow Rules) : “No one anticipated a day when potentially hundreds of thousands of residential mortgage […]

Also filed in | | Comments (0)

Random notes

Friday, January 4, 2008

Good news and old news in the business section of the Times. Apparently the new Fox Business Channel, it of the all good economic news, all the time (while there’s a Republican in the White House) mindset, has so few daily viewers that Nielsen cannot reliably report it. Leaked figures indicate that a little more […]

Also filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (0)