The John Carney-Barry Ritholtz debate on whether the Community Reinvestment Act caused the financial crisis has a strangely retro feel to it. It’s just so … 2008. It started with Clusterstock’s Carney explaining, in a long, thoughtful post, why he had changed his mind about the 1977 law meant to bring more bank lending to [...]
House prices are falling slightly less fast, according to today’s Case-Shiller data. Let’s celebrate? The 20-city home-price index was still down 18.1% in April (compared to April 2008), but that was an improvement over March’s 18.7% decline. Yale economist Robert Shiller, he of Case-Shiller fame, has been hitting the airwaves, talking about how this might [...]
Bernard Madoff got his sentence this morning. It’s 150 years in prison, which is a bit longer than your average 71-year-old can be expected to live. (Curious Capitalist Jr. was actually wondering about this yesterday—what if, he asked, Madoff got sentenced to 150 years but doctors discovered new life-extending techniques in coming years that enabled [...]
Last week we decided to put out a special Michael Jackson issue. It should be popping up on newsstands right about now. I never thought I’d have a conversation with ex-Pepsi-CEO Roger Enrico about commercials the company made in the mid-80s, but there we were. In the beginning, being in a soda-pop commercial wasn’t really [...]
My new column, on the case for simpler, cruder financial regulation, is online and in the issue with FDR on the cover.
Bloomberg’s Yalman Onaran has a long look at the role Paul Volcker is playing in the Obama Administration (via Ritholtz). It’s apparently bigger than it was a few months ago: After the inauguration and Geithner’s confirmation, Volcker was elbowed aside, White House insiders say. His economic recovery board took weeks to get off the ground [...]
Here’s a piece I wrote for TIME.com about the Fed’s indecisive monetary policy decision yesterday. Here’s a post I wrote for the TPM Cafe Book Club discussion of Edmund Andrews’s Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown. And finally, here’s some thrilling CNBC action from this morning: more about “Are Markets Rational? – CNBC.com“, posted [...]
The OECD published its charmingly mistitled once-every-few-years report Pensions at a Glance on Tuesday. It’s 280 pages long, and there appears to be lots of stuff in it about the troubles the financial/economics crisis poses for pension funding. But I always go straight for the charts that compare pension systems across countries. The most generous [...]
The prez said today that the Federal Reserve’s response to the financial crisis has been A-OK: Obama, speaking at a midday press conference, defended the performance of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke after the financial crisis. Bernanke has done a “fine job” and “performed well,” the president said. I don’t think Obama’s praise is entirely unwarranted—coping [...]
An op-ed in today’s NYT argues that despite new legislation restricting the fees credit-card companies can charge consumers, there’s a decent chance that your good-citizen cardholder won’t suffer a worst-case scenario of high annual fees, absolutely no perks and interest charges that start to accrue as soon as purchases are made. Ryan Bubb and Alex [...]
