Wall Street got drunk, it got drunk (it’s one of the reasons I asked you to turn off your tv cameras.) It got drunk and now it’s got a hangover. The question is how long will it sober up, and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments. And now we got a housing [...]
I wrote this for the Creative Capitalism project that Conor Clarke and Michael Kinsley are organizing. And I’m reposting it here because recycling is a really important aspect of creative capitalism: There’s already been ample discussion here of Milton Friedman’s famous argument that “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.” But I [...]
Hank Paulson’s Build-Confidence-Without-Saying-Anything-That-Will-Sound-Dimwittedly-Pollyannaish-a-Year-From-Now Tour continued with a speech in New York this morning. It’s actually pretty good, as these things go. But this paragraph struck me as problematic: Looking beyond today’s market challenges, we need to get to the point where large, complex financial institutions are not perceived to be too big or too interconnected [...]
The Congressional Budget Office has just issued its estimate of the likely cost of Hank Paulson’s plan to let troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac draw on a Treasury credit line (that is, borrow money from taxpayers). The verdict: $25 billion. This is what the CBO calls “probability-weighted average” of the different potential [...]
