John McCain is suggesting on the campaign trail today that the IRS rules that require owners of retirement accounts (IRA, 401ks, etc.) to withdraw a certain amount (there’s a formula) from those accounts every year after they turn 70 1/2 ought to be suspended because of the market crash. Sayeth the Senator from Arizona: To [...]
Barry Ritholtz, one of those guys who’s been right a lot over the past couple years about the market, is sniffing a market bottom. He’s just put up a post listing 10 “charts, signals, indicators” that, as he puts it, “suggest to us that we are increasingly close to a bottom that can be purchased [...]
Heidi Moore of the WSJ has a fascinating account of a panel discussion this morning featuring Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone and Glenn Hutchins of Silver Lake. I know a lot of people have soured on anything anybody on Wall Street [...]
Fixing Global Finance, the new book from The Dean himself, FT economics columnist Martin Wolf, just arrived in the mail. Sadly, it doesn’t appears to be about fixing the mess we’re in today. It’s about fixing the huge current account imbalances (we run ginormous deficits, China and Japan run big surpluses) that Wolf says brought [...]
The reports keep coming (and they started, sort of, right here on this blog) that Treasury is putting together a plan that will involve recapitalizing banks (in exchange for equity stakes), temporarily guaranteeing all deposits, and guaranteeing all bank debt maturing in the next 36 months or so. There’s talk in D.C. that they may [...]
Quick anecdote: A friend of mine who works at a place that does GMAT prep gave me a call last night to say that the place was full of ex-Lehman employees. It’s that time of the business cycle, folks. Everyone back to grad school! Let’s just hope these people can get student loans… Barbara!
Sorry I missed this, but my friend Brian O’Keefe from Fortune checked in with Richard Rainwater (like I kept saying I would) last week, and it turns out Rainwater got back into oil stocks a little while back: Back in May, when oil was at $129 per barrel and rising, billionaire investor Richard Rainwater did [...]
The Dow was down another 679 points today. Twelve more days like that and it hits zero. The point being that there aren’t going to be 12 more days like that, at least not in a row. At this point I’m getting really sick of trying offer explanations for why the market did what it [...]
And a lot of other things, too—like a healthcare research facility at the University of Louisville, science labs at Western Kentucky University, and water and sewer lines in rural communities—because it was able to sell $400 million worth of municipal bonds on Tuesday. This is great news, considering that the muni market had pretty much [...]
A couple days ago I wrote a post ribbing Nobel laureate Robert Lucas for his statement at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Economic Association that: 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 [...]
