A reader has asked me to link to this article about what price-rent ratios are telling us about the state of the housing market. Price-rent ratio is basically the price of a house divided by the cost of renting an apartment—a measure of whether houses are more expensive than they should be. Here’s a taste: [...]
In what strikes me as a pretty major change of heart, Citigroup has signed on to Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin’s effort to give bankruptcy judges the power to rewrite the terms of mortgages. Reports the WSJ: The cramdown bill would apply to all mortgage loans, including but not limited to subprime loans, written any time [...]
UPDATE: Justin rings in with a story on Time.com. The spate of retailers reporting devastating December sales this morning provided a nice backdrop for President-elect Obama’s speech in Virginia about why we need to spend another $775 billion to fix the economy. About 40% of that sum comes in the form of tax cuts, but [...]
This TIME.com video visit to Jack Phelan Dodge Suzuki Isuzu in suburban Chicago was my doing, I think. I suggested at a meeting a few weeks back that a car dealer video might be cool, an editor said he’d check into it, and now it has magically appeared on our website. I had this image [...]
Our blog posts here are always followed by a list of “Possibly related posts: (automatically generated).” In my early days at TIME these were embarrassingly useless, but now they’re pretty good, so when I saw the link under my post on Judd Gregg’s dubious tax math to something headlined “Taxes – So, is the U.S. [...]
There are actually two other key central bankers, Hjalmar Schacht of Germany and Émile Moreau of France, in Liaquat Ahamed’s new book about the causes of the Great Depression, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World—but I felt the title for this post was getting a little long. I talked to Ahamed a few [...]
Back in mid-December, after I wrote a post about some numbers from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) that seemed to show loan modifications don’t work so well, a reader of this blog suggested that the data release might be politically motivated—that the Bush administration, no fan of Sheila Bair’s crusade to [...]
In an otherwise not-all-that-objectionable op-ed piece in Monday’s WSJ, Republican New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg (or one of his staffers) writes: The growth in tax revenues from 2002 through 2007 were some of the largest in history. The tax system became much more progressive, with the top 20% of income earners paying 85% of the [...]
A lot of people have been calling Bernie Madoff’s apparent $50 billion Ponzi scheme the biggest financial fraud in history. Christopher McKenna, a business historian at Oxford University who stopped by TIME for a visit today, doubts it. “I think Kreuger is bigger,” he says. “The question is how do you measure that. His losses [...]
The House Financial Services Committee begins its Bernie Madoff inquisition this afternoon, and the Securities and Exchange Commission is sure to get its share of flack from both witnesses and committee members. Meanwhile, Sunday’s New York Times contained an epic tirade against the SEC and other blameful parties (mainly the rating agencies) by hedge fund [...]
