Arnold Kling, riffing on something I wrote the other day about the end of investment banking as we’ve known it, writes: I think of securitization as like the dead parrot in the famous Monty Python sketch. Trying to rescue it or revive it strikes me as madness. I keep saying that we need to revert [...]
General Motors has submitted its 37-page “Restructuring Plan for Long-Term Viability” (a.k.a. request for an $18 billion bailout) to Congress. There’s still a lot of defensive hey-we’re-already-totally-competitive-so-just-lay-off stuff in it (16-17 pages worth, I’d say), and of course a lot fuel-efficiency-is-job-one stuff to appease the Democrats from the coasts (another 10 pages, maybe). But that [...]
Alan Mullaly will be driving in a Ford Escape hybrid. Rick Wagoner will travel in a Chevy Malibu hybrid. Bob Nardelli hasn’t figured out how he’ll get there yet, but taking a private jet is out of the question. It’s not quite carpooling in a minivan, as I suggested they do a couple weeks ago, [...]
You may have noticed that yesterday was a rough day for the market. And last week had gone so well, too. Shoot. This morning I was talking to some folks over at the electronic trading platform Liquidnet, and one of them pointed me to a Citigroup report that lends nice context to the recent volatility. [...]
Having made the argument a couple of months back that repealing the Glass-Steagall Act was a good thing because it allowed J.P. Morgan Chase to buy Bear Stearns and Bank of America to (maybe) buy Merrill Lynch, I’ve been feeling a little guilty about not having revisited it yet in light of Citigroup’s troubles. So [...]
The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the semi-official arbiter of whether we’re in a recession or not, has finally made the call: The committee determined that a peak in economic activity occurred in the U.S. economy in December 2007. The peak marks the end of the expansion that began [...]
On the sad occasion of the death of Doris “Tanta” Dungey, I’ve been hunting through her classic collection of Compleat Ubernerd posts about the mortgage business for some commemorative excerpts. But the whole point of these long, mostly brilliant essays on the workings of REMICs, TACs, PACs, CDOs, ABSes and the like is that they [...]
