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 [...]

I’m the commentator tonight on the Nightly Business Report on PBS, which airs at 6:30 p.m. here in New York and whenever PBS says its on in your hometown. I talk about Fannie and Freddie and Bear and bailouts and such. For some reason I feel awkward posting the script now, before the segment has [...]

Richard Bitner, author of the new book Confessions of a Subprime Lender (known in its previous, self-published incarnation as Greed, Fraud & Ignorance), is going to be on the Daily Show tonight. He was here Friday, and was pretty entertaining and enlightening. I failed to videotape him, though. So watch him tonight, and in the [...]

Stephen Colbert still deserves credit for “truthiness.” But it turns out its relative “factiness,” which Colbert purported to coin early last year, was already in use in the 1870s. This is from a letter written by naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir after his first meeting with the great botanist Asa Gray in 1872: [...]

She’s not real clear on the details. But it definitely wasn’t her brother’s fault (via Gawker).

Jonathan Chait has written an epic and perfectly Chaitian takedown of Naomi Klein for The New Republic (nothing else he writes will ever be as perfectly Chaitian as his takedown of Delaware, Rogue State; but this comes close). I’d advise reading the whole thing just for the sheer pleasure of watching a master polemicist at [...]