A little over a year ago, I invited readers to suggest names for this financial crisis we (still) find ourselves in. Despite getting lots of great suggestions here and elsewhere, I never pulled the trigger and picked a winner. I was probably right not to do so—I was looking not so much for the funniest [...]
Eventually, if I keep trying hard enough, I will find a way to make these two lines converge: In a comment to my last chart comparing job losses now to those in the early 1930s, plukasiak wrote: the problem I have with this chart is that it conflates “job peak” with the beginning of comparable [...]
I like the reading suggestions I get from readers, so I clicked through on bryanfromhouston’s link to this piece by Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald made his name exposing the Bush administration’s disdain for the Constitution and the media’s lame coverage of the Bush administration, and apparently plans to stick with that theme for the rest of [...]
My first stab at comparing non-farm payroll employment declines in the current recession with those from the Great Depression was beset by a couple of flaws. One was that I was using seasonally adjusted numbers from the current recession while the figures from the 1930s were unadjusted. That was easy enough to fix. The other [...]
One of my favorite things about American industriousness is how often we use it to bilk each other out of money. Today a bunch of federal agencies and the Illinois attorney general announced that they’re going after a rash of mortgage modification frauds and foreclosure scams. From the AP story: Government officials said Monday that [...]
Two economists’ missives to clients just arrived in my e-mail inbox, and they make for an interesting pair. Goldman Sachs chief U.S. economist Jan Hatzius, in a note titled “More Signs of Stabilization,” writes: A sharp improvement from the current pace is very likely, and a pickup from -7% in Q1 to -1% in H2 [...]
Louise Story has a story in today’s NYT about Larry Summers’s two years at hedge fund giant D.E. Shaw. The topic of what the heck Larry was doing at Shaw came up in this blog not long after he joined. After initially mocking him, I eventually came around to the idea that he might be [...]
TIME Asia’s Michael Schuman asks Is the Dollar Doomed? His answer is basically: “Sure. Someday.” And he throws some cold water on the idea that the IMF’s special drawing rights could become the world’s new reserve currency: And what would take the greenback’s place? Economists say that China’s suggestion of turning to SDRs might be [...]
The Dutch have had their own bonus brouhaha over the past few weeks, with bailed-out bank ING coming under fire for paying out 300 million euros in bonuses for 2008. It resulted in the bank’s chief executive asking his top 1,200 managers to give their bonuses back, and then a “gentleman’s agreement” (herenakkoord) between Finance [...]
My latest column is online. It’s about the private equity business, and it was inspired by the gloomy talk by private equiteer George Siguler that I wrote about last week. I quote Siguler in the column, and I spell his name correctly. I had trouble with lots of others. Copy editors here caught me calling [...]
