What did we learn about the candidates’ economic policies tonight? John McCain is going to cut pork-barrel spending. All $18 billion of it. Barack Obama has a lot of seven- (or five- or three- or whatever) point plans to make things better for nurses and other regular folks like you and me. And they’re both [...]
From Brad DeLong: Is 2008 Our 1929? No. It is not. The most important reason it is not is that Bernanke and Paulson are both focused like laser beams on not making the same mistakes as were made in 1929. They are also focused, but not quite as much, on not making the mistakes made [...]
I just realized, in reading over my post on the House Republicans’ alternative to the Paulson plan, a.k.a. the TARP, that I kind of buried the lede. I asked Mark Zandi, a big-time expert on the mortgage mess (buy his book here) and a McCain adviser (not one of the guys who rides along in [...]
I’ve been doing a little checking around on Eric Cantor‘s idea to insure everybody’s mortgage, which he and other House Republicans presented Thursday as an alternative to the Hank Paulson’s TARP (for Troubled Asset Retrieval Program) and is now generating some talk, folks in TIME’s Washington bureau tell me, of a blended plan that would [...]
Remember the first bailout bill? The one Congress called the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008? It drives me batty to hear all these politicians talk about not doing more for Main Street when we already have legislation meant to do just that. In installment one of Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke Go to [...]
The apparent collapse of negotiations last night over the Paulson bailout led to a lot of fears that we’d witness a financial market massacre this morning. As Paul Krugman put it at 9:34 p.m.: I don’t even want to think about what tomorrow’s TED spread will look like. The TED spread–for those of you who [...]
