The details are out on the government’s trillion-dollar program to spark lending by financing the sale of securitizations. Originally, we were just going to do securities backed by loans to consumers and small businesses, but now we’re also looking to give a boost to loans for heavy industrial equipment, rental-car fleets and agricultural-equipment leases. The [...]
In the comments to a post I wrote last week on the tax hikes in the Obama budget, someone named frontier2 got a lot of you (and me) riled up with his/her comments that he/she was “already trying to figure out how I can work less in order to make just under $250k.” Well, it [...]
Noam Scheiber has an interesting if (perhaps inevitably) inconclusive article in The New Republic on “What’s stopping Tim Geithner?” It begins: In June 2007, Tim Geithner, then the president of the New York Fed, gave a speech about the financial crisis he’d helped defuse as a Clinton Treasury official in the late 1990s. … Geithner [...]
The International Labor Organization has put together a useful compendium of economic stimulus efforts around the world (click here to download the Word file). I know this not because they announced it or anything but because a former student of Harvard economist Dani Rodrik works at the ILO and wrote in to Rodrik point out [...]
Proponents of the nationalization of troubled big banking companies like Citigroup generally make the case that the work should be done with dispatch and the banks returned promptly to private hands. But the test case for nationalization, AIG, is demonstrating that it may not be that easy. When the Federal Reserve effectively took over AIG [...]
As you can see, we didn’t get a huge amount of snow in Manhattan overnight. But schools chancellor Joel Klein has decided in his wisdom that “today’s a day for a snow day,” and New York City public schools are closed because of snow for the first time since Curious Capitalist Jr. began attending five [...]
