Archive for October, 2008

The irony in today’s news is that just as the economy is declining into what will probably be a nasty recession, there are the first flickers of hope that the worst case scenarios everyone has been playing with – depression era stuff – are almost certainly now not going to happen. Here’s the New… »

I can’t let this go by. Today’s New York Times has the following article by Greg Mankiw: Economics View-But Have We Learned Enough? NYTimes.com
The article is fine. It’s the implication I want to bring to your attention. He concludes with some sobering words about the ability of the economics profession to understand… »

To follow up my earlier comments: today’s discussions at the Treasury Department in DC involved the heads of most of the major US banks. The New York Times story is here: Treasury Outlines Investments in Banks
Curiously Wells Fargo, the purchaser of Wachovia is not listed as an attendee. This is odd given the… »

Is it just me, or does this headline taken from the New York Times suggest that the Stock Markets have embraced socialism?Stocks Soar on Pledges of New Capital
How odd is it to see the Stock Market, a bastion of capitalism, making so much hay in response to the announcement of direct investments by national governments… »

It looks very much as if the US Treasury is going to adopt the European model in the next stage of the bank bailout. Late tonight the New York Times had this story:U.S. May Take Ownership Stake in Banks
The real novelty here is that the government is prepared to take ownership shares of a… »

This article in today’s New York Times: Europe Tested by Financial Crisis highlights just how bad the situation is now getting. The rot that was the American mortgage market has now spread like a cancer to Europe.
European banks were eager to hold American assets because of the size, liquidity, and reputed safety of… »

One of the lessons of the current crisis in our economy is that the ‘free-market’ ideology of the right wingers is not a serious long term proposition: constant deregulation, which is designed to ‘free’ the market and let it find its own way, has led us into the current malaise. Apparently no one bothered… »