Brad DeLong points out that Ronald Reagan was far more concerned about unemployment than Team Obama (or Washington generally) is, and also took far more aggressive measures to combat it. From The Week (hat tip reader Marshall): By the start of 1983, labor unions were frantically giving back previously-promised wage increases and offering wage cuts […]
Read more...Public officials of all sorts have tried ratcheting up their halting efforts to Do Something about Wall Street chicanery to appease an unhappy public. One manifestation has been increased frequency of a long-established enforcement pattern, of picking off select, high profile targets while leaving many corrupt practices in place. The object lesson du jour is […]
Read more...Reader Richard Smith provided a sighting of bank boosterism, courtesy The Economist: The happy secret of Western banking is that the system in aggregate now has lots of capital (see chart) relative to the net losses experienced over the crisis. The kind of erosion of capital forecast by the Federal Reserve’s stress tests last year, […]
Read more...As previous posts on this blog have discussed, trying simultaneously to shrink total private sector debt levels and government debt levels at the same time, absent very aggressive currency depreciation or other measures to increase net exports, is likely to result in a fall in GDP and deflation. Ironically, that means overly aggressive measures to […]
Read more...Ooh, did this writer nail it. From Dilip Hiro via TomGram. His critique of Obama focuses on foreign policy, but his opening remarks are valid across the board: Irrespective of their politics, flawed leaders share a common trait. They generally remain remarkably oblivious to the harm they do to the nation they lead. George W. […]
Read more...So now it’s official. As many feared, the Gulf Oil oil spill is the worst the US has ever suffered. No wonder BP has been trying to keep the officialdom and scientists away from it as long as possible….. From the Washington Post (hat tip reader Marshall): As crews pumped mud at a furious rate […]
Read more...The geyser of oil and less than cheery news on the Gulf oil spill continues unabated. The news updates of the day include: Reports from a Congressional briefing that suggest, as many have speculated, that the mud was removed despite heavy gas output, a warning sign, with BP admitting its workers may have made a […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. We are in the midst of severe economic and financial crises. These crises have led to reappraisals of received […]
Read more...Oh, if you don’t love the smell of naplam in the morning, you will not be happy with the market actions. Per my delayed Bloomberg, Euro flirting with recent lows, at 1.2281. Gold off at $1187 an ounce. (which fits if you believe in deflation, even though gold does well in deflation, the inflationistas may […]
Read more...Wow, the Obama Administration is less than a year and a half old, and it’s already twiddling with the record. I was gobsmacked to see this section in a post by Felix Salmon today, on a new book by Jonathan Alter and a New York Magazine cover story by John Heilemann: Both Alter and Heilemann […]
Read more...Just when you thought financial firm accounting couldn’t get more dubious…it gets worse. Deux Ex Macchiato (hat tip FT Alphaville) tells of the disconcerting changes to what was formerly called FAS Rule 157, which brought us Level 1, 2, and 3 accounting. A brief recap: Readers may recall that the Financial Standards Accounting Board implemented […]
Read more...Wolfgang Munchau, in the Financial Times, revives a line of thought that was voiced from time to time during the financial crisis: that some countries (the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland) had banking sectors that were so large that it was an open question as to whether they could credibly backstop them. One of the […]
Read more...This is just a snippet (and this message is per the request of Lambert Strether, who has a post of his own up and trying to get further information from other Deepwater Horizon live cam bloggers or watchers): Major changes happening at BP Disaster site: http://monkeyfister.blogspot.com/2010/05… There have been several major eruptions of the seabed […]
Read more...Hhhm, are investigations disappearing into the night just like FDIC resolutions, Friday night massacres so as not to upset the great unwashed public? Joe Cassano, head of AIG’s Financial Products Group and individual most responsible for the insurer’s collapse, will not be prosecuted. Per the Wall Street Journal: Federal prosecutors will not bring criminal charges […]
Read more...By Warren Mosler, a fund manager, co-founder and Distinguished Research Associate of The Center for Full Employment And Price Stability at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, and creator of the modern euro swap futures contract. Gillian Tett of the Financial Times wrote today about stress in the dollar funding markets, which she regards […]
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