Today’s looking like the most fraught day yet in the rolling financial crisis of 07-08(-09?). Yeah, U.S. stock prices are up as of 10:50 a.m. But despite the continuing tendency of CNBC (and most of the rest of the financial media) to focus on the Dow and the S&P, they’re not what really matter here. [...]

So JP Morgan Chase is buying Bear Stearns, for what everybody’s reporting to be somewhere in the $230-$250 million range. That’s significantly less than Bear Stearns’ newish headquarters building at 383 Madison Ave.–a few blocks from JP Morgan Chase’s HQ–would fetch. Estimates Bloomberg: The 1.2 million-square-foot, 45-story structure built in 2001 is worth about $1.2 [...]

We’re back to Bear Stearns, where it all began. Last summer, it was the collapse of a couple of mortgage-security hedge funds run by the investment bank that sent credit markets into their first true tizzy. Now a Fed-backed temporary bailout of Bear means the 85-year-old firm may not survive much longer as an independent [...]

I have two pieces in the new issue of Time with a “10 ideas that are changing the world” on the cover. One of them is one of those 10 ideas, really less an idea than an incipient trend, which I called “The New Austerity.” It begins: Journalists and others with a tendency to see [...]

While the econoscribes of the U.S. (me included) were writing Thursday about what the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets had to say about the current financial crisis, a guy who may know more about dealing with financial disaster than anybody in Washington was giving a speech on “kriser i det finansiella systemet” to the [...]

I’ve been reading the 21-page Policy Statement on Financial Market Developments of the Hank-Paulson-led President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. It’s got a lot of acronyms in it. It’s also five years late and a few trillion dollars short, but that’s almost always the case with financial regulation. We’re very good at designing rules to [...]

Commenter smedley and Swamplander Karen Tumulty have asked me to take a look at President Bush’s speech yesterday to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, especially his comments about tax cuts. Here they are: I remember meeting with some right after the attacks and we were wondering whether or not our economy could withstand a [...]

Yesterday afternoon the news was that Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman got $5 billion in compensation last year. But now AP is running the following correction: In an earlier version of this story, the Associated Press erroneously reported that Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman’s total compensation for 2007 was $5.13 billion. Schwarzman’s compensation for 2007 was $350.7 million. [...]

This 1981 beauty is part of a feature on the “Worst TIME Covers” on Time.com. But seriously, what do you think? Love ‘em or hate ‘em? Update: An alert reader points out that one of the reporters on the cat cover story was, get this, Maureen Dowd.