I heard this on my favorite Dutch radio show a while back, and when I discovered today that it’s on YouTube, I could not but share. It’s the Leonard Cohen song “Dance me to the end of love,” sung by Frisian singer-songwriter Elske de Wall and what appears to be her sister Femke. Sung in [...]
My new column is about the thrilling rebirth of the special drawing right, the currency of the International Monetary Fund. Need I say more? One expert on the subject who was very helpful, but didn’t make it into the column, was C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Bergsten was extolling [...]
I was walking up Broadway a couple days ago when I saw a BusinessWeek cover in the window of a magazine shop, illustrated with a couple of green shoots poking out of the ground, on “Signs of Life” in the housing market. So much for that housing bottom, I thought to myself. The green shoots [...]
I’ve got a new TIME.com piece on the sudden, recession-caused disappearance of the subsidy the Social Security system has been providing to the rest of the federal government for the past quarter century. This had been projected to happen in 2017, but it turns out we didn’t have to wait. The man you all know [...]
TIME’s Massimo Calabresi has a really interesting little piece about the spectacular lack of interest in the latest round of Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility lending. TALF has $200 billion in potential funding. Last month it loaned $4.7 billion. This month, just $1.7 billion. Writes Massimo: There are three possible reasons for the shortfall in [...]
The news, reported by Eric Dash in the NYT, that the stress tests of 19 big banks are almost all done and none of the 19 will be due for an immediate FDIC takeover as a result has been greeted in the financial blogosphere with all manner of hooting and moaning and groaning. I get [...]
I have a story up on Time.com which Justin called “actually really interesting.” I thought that was “actually really insightful” on his part, so I decided to do a post. The story begins: General Motors desperately wants to avoid bankruptcy. But at the same time the automaker is preparing for that possibility. One thing on [...]
Wells Fargo announced this morning that it made a lot of money in the first quarter—”approximately $3 billion.” As I wrote last month when Citi let slip that its January and February looked pretty good, this shouldn’t be all that big a surprise: Federal Reserve liquidity programs and FDIC guarantees have sharply lowered banks’ funding [...]
The WaPo’s Steven Pearlstein, reviewing Lloyd Blankfein’s big speech in D.C. yesterday, nails the two big blind spots that even an enlightened Wall Streeter like Blankfein can’t seem to rid himself of: The most important is culture — in the case of Wall Street, a culture that not only tolerates but almost celebrates taking advantage [...]
Jed Graham, who covers economic policy for Investor’s Business Daily, has been writing occasional how-to-fix-the-mortgage-market essays for RGE Monitor since last fall. His most recent (it’s about 10 days old, but who’s counting?) begins: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s toxic asset plan is a brilliant, highly complex and very expensive answer to the wrong question: How [...]
