Former Curious Capitalist guest blogger Mark Gimein has been writing up a storm lately at The Big Money, Slate’s new business site. I really like his latest piece, about why it’s so hard to make money betting against bubbles. A sample: Bubbles actually punish rational expectations. Andrew Lo, an economist at MIT… explains it like [...]
Did anybody else notice that when Hank Paulson was describing in his press conference today what the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act enables Treasury to do, the first thing he listed was “to inject capital into financial institutions”? That wasn’t how Treasury initially advertised its Troubled Asset Relief Program. It was sold as a way to [...]
A few weeks ago Steve Randy Waldman had a nice post titled Real Capitalists Nationalize. His argument: The superficially private-sector-friendly Paulson Plan is likely to entail socializing losses and undermining the incentives that give capitalism its efficacy and its legitimacy. Outright nationalization, on the other hand, may look like a Commie statist plot, but strengthens [...]
John McCain’s announcement during the debate Tuesday night that he wants the government to spend $300 billion buying up mortgages and rewriting the terms was something of a landmark in the national discussion over what to do about our financial mess. Yeah, it was a half-baked proposal that made no acknowledgement of the fact that [...]
