Since we’ll probably all be joining the ranks of the unemployed in the coming months, it’s nice to know that that there are ironic pleasures to be had at the employment office. From a friend of a friend (yes, it’s an actual person; the educational-video connoisseurs among you may even be able to figure out [...]

Over the past couple of weeks there’s been chatter about companies possibly not being able to pay workers because of the credit crunch. The idea is that without ready access to the commercial paper market—which big companies use to issue short-term IOUs—there won’t be enough money to finance things like inventory and payroll. The commercial [...]

I should really turn off CNBC, as it’s shaking my brain into Jello, but Zachary Karabell just said something I liked: Unless you believe the market’s going to hit zero in 25 days, we’re not going to have days like this every day. But what if you believe the market’s going to hit -10,000 in [...]

From Robert Lucas‘s 2003 presidential address to the American Economics Association: Macroeconomics was born as a distinct field in the 1940s, as a part of the intellectual response to the Great Depression. The term then referred to the body of knowledge and expertise that we hoped would prevent the recurrence of that economic disaster. My [...]

I’ve addressed this before, but it keeps coming up–in e-mails from readers, among many other places–so I’m gonna outsource to Dan Gross: Fannie and Freddie, which didn’t make subprime loans but did buy subprime loans made by others, were part of the problem. Poor Congressional oversight was part of the problem. Banks that sought to [...]

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke gave his first speech in a month today (although I guess he did do some testifying a couple weeks ago). In typically laid-back Bernankian fashion he described all the crazy stuff that’s been happening, described the response by the Fed, Treasury and FDIC, and said that he believed these “bold actions [...]

When Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke testified before Congress a few weeks ago, they got asked about regulating credit default swaps—insurance contracts tied to bonds that have taken on a potentially dangerous life all their own. The response was basically: It’s really important to sort these things out, but also really complicated, and we’re trying [...]

Governments around the world have been acting to avert panics by retail bank customers, and they’ve mostly succeeded. That’s a good thing, but it’s also sort of beside the point. “Main Street depositors are keeping confidence,” FDIC chairman Sheila Bair said when I talked to her last week. “It’s other banks that are the problem.” [...]