I’ve got a new piece up on TIME.com. It was originally intended as my column for the magazine, but got bumped by the dastardly space-constrained editors. Here’s how it begins: It has become an article of faith for many on the left — and some from other political precincts — that the 1999 repeal of [...]

UK-based economist Willem Buiter, who earlier in the year was fiercely critical of the U.S. approach to managing the financial crisis, is okay with the AIG deal. But he wonders if it should be the beginning of something bigger: If financial behemoths like AIG are too large and/or too interconnected to fail but not too [...]

The Connecticut Hedge Fund Association got a lot of queries this week about whether its annual conference in Greenwich would go on as planned. It did, and Reuters tells us what it was like: The $1.9 trillion hedge fund industry’s own losses were on the minds of the roughly 350 managers and job seekers settled [...]

The Commerce Department’s report this morning on New Residential Construction in August 2008 (pdf) is generally being painted as dire news. To quote the AP: The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that housing construction dropped a surprise 6.2 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 895,000 units. That’s the slowest building pace since [...]

It’s not that AIG is too big too fail—rather that it’s too connected to the rest of the financial system for policymakers to stand by and watch it collapse. At the heart of that connectedness is the credit default swap (CDS). Not familiar? Back in March, Janet Morrissey wrote a story for Time.com explaining what [...]