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 [...]
In one of the most entertaining of the many entertaining passages in Robert Heilbronner’s The Worldly Philosophers, Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter regales his Harvard students in the mid-1930s with these encouraging words: Chentleman, you are vorried about the depression. You should not be. For capitalism, a depression is a good cold douche. [By which he [...]
