Watch a bit of jousting during the hearings on AIG today: Now one can take the position that Grayson is merely trying to score points, but I don’t see it that way. Instead, he is trying to make a response to a basic and unanswered question: Who were these people who wrecked AIG and other […]
Read more...I must confess to being very late to read Nassim Nicolas Taleb’s The Black Swan, and frankly had considered NOT reading it. First, it has been so widely reviewed and discussed that I had assumed the additional knowledge to be gained by reading the book itself would be marginal. Second, I’ve read a bit of […]
Read more...Faithful readers, I know the blog has become more polemic in tone over the last few months. We are in the stage of the cycle, as Warren Buffet put it, the tide has gone out and we are seeing who isn’t wearing a swimming suit. Worse, as the powers that be are desperately throwing funds […]
Read more...In the dot-bomb era, you’d read the occasional story about how former Internet high-flier employees were working at Home Depot. I am not certain what happened to those in Wall Street who lost their jobs in the 1990-1991 downturn. I know some got jobs with big corporations, a few went to DC. However, the carnage […]
Read more...I was in Kansas City at a econbloggers conference hosted by the Kauffman Foundation, and one of the breakout discussions was on the fate of finance. One participant who claimed to be have a basis for his view (it could be based on private polling or focus group research, or less scientific methods) said that […]
Read more...In case you managed to miss it, Japan has taken a huge fall in its relative economic standing by more or less standing still for almost a generation. The comparative fall is 30%. And even though visitors to Japan do not see the superficial signs of distress (infrastructure is well maintained, people are neatly dressed, […]
Read more...Kansas is in the middle of a budget brawl, and tax refunds may be on hold if it isn’t resolved pronto. From the Kansas City Star: The Kansas Finance Council was to meet at 1 p.m. today to vote on whether to borrow $225 million from healthy state funds to cover expected payments to schools, […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal Economics Blog today featured an update of a chart prepared by Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, comparing the compensation of French and American civil servants, with an update (click to enlarge): The problem is that this comparison is misleading. The intent is to illustrate pay disparities over time. […]
Read more...This blog was early to draw a comparison between the US financial crisis and emerging markets crises. As we wrote in March 2008: Although the Journal does not draw this comparison, the US is in very much the same boat as Thailand and Indonesia in 1997, during the emerging markets crisis. And although the US […]
Read more...Even before its inception, we’ve been very skeptical of the TARP. Paulson managed to get the type of spending authorization that you only see in wartime, with almost no contraints on what he could do, and most troubling, put himself beyond the reach of law. From the original draft of the bill: Decisions by the […]
Read more...At the risk of losing all cred with tech enthusiast readers, let me use a suggestion (from Dwight) as a point of departure: I thought I would recommend that you both consider adopting Twitter as part of your blogging presence in 2009. Twitter was organized in 2006 and hit 6 million registered users by the […]
Read more...Today, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri introduced legislation that would limit salary, bonus, and stock options for executives as financial firm recipients of bailout funds be limited to the President’s level of pay, currently $400,000. McCaskill’s proposal is likely to go all of nowhere. She is not a member of the Finance or Appropriations committee, […]
Read more...I am struggling for the right metaphor to describe Timothy Geithner’s conduct. Marie Antionette ain’t bad, but perhaps better is the Last Commandment from Animal Farm: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others This blogger was troubled by Geithner’s demeanor during the Senate hearings on the Bear Stearns bailout, when […]
Read more...A major caveat: the survey cited below comes from a “financial jobs website.” Presumably, users of that sort of site either have no job or are looking to change jobs and therefore are not particularly happy. Nevertheless, the last few years were particularly fat, and the young ‘uns appeared to have gotten conditioned to the […]
Read more...Even if there were a rationale for Citi buying a corporate jet now (which I cannot fathom, given their horrid financial condiiton), why buy new? There are no doubt plenty of used jets for sale right now. This incident illustrates the degree to which a corporate/financial elite has developed in the US. Top executives feel […]
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