The WSJ is reporting that the bank-rescue plan to be unveiled by Treasury Tuesday will call for the government to spend the first $250 billion of its TARP stash buying equity stakes in banks–”potentially thousands of banks”–and for the FDIC to temporarily insure all non-interest-bearing deposits and new senior debt issued by banks and thrifts. [...]

I have been busy writing what we like to call “market wrap” stories. Here’s the one I wrote today. And here’s the one from Friday. I’m doing my best to come up with new ways to say that people shouldn’t read too much into what the Dow does on any particular day while, at the [...]

I’ve been reading the speech Barack Obama made on the economy this afternoon, plus his new Rescue Plan for the Middle Class. The speech ends with an eloquent farewell to the age of easy money: We’ve lived through an era of easy money, in which we were allowed and even encouraged to spend without limits; [...]

When last I checked, the Dow was up 6.9% and the S&P 7.5% in reaction to Paul Krugman getting the economics Nobel before trading began this morning. In London the FTSE ended the trading day up 8.26% and in Frankfurt the DAX was up 11.4%. What? You say there are other possible reasons for global [...]

I have an article in the new Fortune magazine, which has a cracked GE lightbulb on the cover. It begins: On Nov. 21, 2002, just two months after leaving Princeton University’s economics department for a spot on the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke gave a speech in Washington on the topic of deflation. At the [...]

Almost a decade ago, I was working on an article for Fortune about the then-current state of economics. The narrative I settled on was one in which in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cambridge, Mass., had been the birthplace of a new economic mainstream: This was the context in which the young scholars of [...]

We’re going to get the exact dollar totals Monday, but the Eurozone plan to backstop banks appears to be substantial. The German share alone is going to be 400 billion euros ($542 billion), it was reported Sunday. The UK is also about to pour 39 billion pounds ($66 billion) into RBS, HBOS and Lloyds TSB. [...]

From the FT: Officials have reviewed the nuclear option of providing an Irish-style sovereign guarantee for all US bank deposits and many or all categories of bank debt as a means of restoring banks’ access to private funds. But they fear that providing formal guarantees only for banks would trigger the implosion of financial firms [...]

The G-7 finance ministers say they’re going to “take decisive action and use all available tools to support systemically important financial institutions and prevent their failure.” Hank Paulson says that: As we develop plans to purchase equity … we are working to develop a standardized program that is open to a broad array of financial [...]