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 [...]

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 [...]