Marc Gunther asks: Do you care who in the government knew about the AIG bonuses, and when they knew it? Do you think the AIG executives who collected bonuses deserve opprobrium? I don’t. Although the $165 (or $218) million in bonuses have become a symbol of executive compensation gone wild, pointing fingers at Tim Geithner [...]
“Learning” is probably too strong a word. “Looking at and failing to comprehend” is more like it. There are posters like this all over the conference wing of the Santa Clara Marriott, put up by Ph.D students with fellowships from the Hertz Foundation to explain what they’re up to. Bill Gates is supposed to come [...]
Here’s my new column. And, just to give you the readers of the Curious Capitalist some added value, I have reproduced the column I originally wrote, then tore up because I didn’t like it, after the break. I’m currently sitting in a semi-comfy chair at the Santa Clara Marriott, which is right across the street [...]
I’m currently a couple doors down from the house where I grew up in Lafayette, Calif., mooching off the neighbors’ wifi (thanks, Roger and Jeane!). And I’m trying to figure out what I think about the House of Representatives voting 328 to 93 today to impose that 90% tax on bonuses paid out by companies [...]
At the new JetBlue terminal at JFK. I’m about to get on a plane to Oakland. More news later.
My TIME colleague Massimo Calabresi reports that: Though Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Congressional leaders Tuesday he only learned of the impending $160 million bonus payments to members of AIG’s troubled financial products unit March 10, sources tell TIME that the New York Federal Reserve informed Treasury staff that the payments were imminent on February [...]
The Federal Open Market Committee, that group whose interest rate decisions we used to care about back before the Federal funds rate settled down around 0.15%, moved markets this afternoon with its announcement that it was going to buy lots more mortgage securities (up to $750 billion more) and start buying long-term Treasuries (up to [...]
I had the curious experience this morning of finishing a column and being deeply dissatisfied with it, then reading a Steve Randy Waldman post that inspired me to go back and fix it. And now I’m reasonably happy with the column. I can’t show it to you yet (and it’s always possible my editors will [...]
This morning the Department of Commerce reported (PDF) that housing starts jumped 22% in February to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 583,000. January’s figure, 477,000, had been a record low. Some commentators are taking the uptick as a sign that the housing market may be bottoming, though other MSM regulars—a couple of whom are [...]
BusinessWeek‘s Michael Mandel asks the big question: Should We Have Saved Lehman and Let AIG Fail? These folks at AIG are turning out to be annoying and amateurs to boot, in the deepest sense. It looks like they were just playing out of their league, and they signed bad contracts. I would rather have bet [...]
