My new column is up online, and in the issue of Time with Rosie the Peace Corps Conscriptee on the cover. It begins: The last big mortgage debacle, the savings-and-loan crisis, was made mostly in Washington. The S&Ls were required by law to borrow short (via savings deposits) and lend long (via 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages). [...]

An important public service message from the Curious Capitalist (photo by Mrs. CC): There are signs like this all over the Bay area. Have been for weeks. The Chronicle reports that Caltrans is spending close to $1 million to warn people. I’m very curious as to how many will nonetheless be shocked and surprised when [...]

The indispensable Greg Ip, in today’s W$J, tries to explain what makes the Bernanke approach different from the Greenspan one: The Fed historically has had two major economic duties. Maintaining financial stability is one. Controlling inflation while preventing recession is the other. To Mr. Greenspan, market confidence and the economy’s growth prospects were so intertwined [...]

My post Tuesday on the evils of teaser-rate mortgages engendered a lot of comment. This probably had less to do with the actual content of the post than with the fact that it was linked to on the CNNMoney home page, but whatever. It’s a topic folks are interested in these days, for good reason. [...]

In his Maverecon blog, London School of Economics prof Willem Buiter, whose interesting ideas about what central banks should do in times like these have been getting a lot of attention lately, offers an explanation of why financial markets do that voodoo that they do. They’re manic-depressive–or, to use what Buiter calls a “wimpish medical [...]

I keep getting offers in the mail from an outfit called Allied Mortgage that says it can cut my mortgage payments in half by refinancing at 6.125%. I don’t see how that’s possible, given that my current rate (on a 7/1 ARM) is less than that. I saw a similar offer in an ad online [...]

Bond guru Bill Gross’s suggestion that we need a zillion-dollar federal bailout for homeowners who are having trouble paying off their mortgages is generating all sorts of talk in the econoblogosphere. No one seems to entirely buy Gross’s notion that we need a “Reconstruction Mortgage Corporation” that would presumably buy up troubled mortgage securities and [...]

Gretchen Morgenson has a big piece on Countrywide’s mortgage-lending practices in Sunday’s NYT. She makes them look really bad: Countrywide’s entire operation, from its computer system to its incentive pay structure and financing arrangements, is intended to wring maximum profits out of the mortgage lending boom no matter what it costs borrowers, according to interviews [...]

I’ll be doing a commentary on PBS’s Nightly Business Report this evening. Actually, I’ve already taped it, but whatever. It’s a shorter version, adapted for TV, of my column in the current Time about the Fed and its role as stopper of modern bank runs. I’ll post the text of it after it airs. If [...]