I spent some time with alleged mega-scammer Bernard Madoff last fall. And ever since I got the WSJ news alert e-mail Thursday afternoon about his arrest, I’ve been thinking I should write something about my experiences. My problem has been that I can barely remember them. Madoff was kind of a cipher: Nice enough guy, [...]
I’ve done a lot of bashing here of those who think the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act separating banking from the investment business is to blame for all our troubles. I’ve also argued that securitization—at least fancy-pants securitization—has been partly at fault. So it was interesting to hear an economist I admire make the [...]
It was pretty clear last Thursday when the Detroit Three CEOs testified before the Senate Banking Committee that a lot of Senators (among them committee Chairman Chris Dodd and ranking Republican Dick Shelby) were interested in punting the auto bailout to the Bush administration or the Federal Reserve. Now they’ve gotten their way, and it’s [...]
My new column is online and in the issue of TIME with a bunch of lists on the cover. It begins: It was only on the first of December that we finally got formal permission–from the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)–to call what the U.S. economy is experiencing [...]
