Stanford profs Kenneth Scott and John Taylor had an op-ed in yesterday’s WSJ arguing for “mandated transparency” in mortgage securitization. This brought to mind a conversation I had last week with Andrew Dubinsky, who runs a lending software company called Encomia and would love it if somebody mandated more disclosure in mortgage securitization. Right now, [...]
I liked John Gapper’s FT profile of CNBC’s “pugnacious pundit” Charlie Gasparino. A typical passage (with the curse words bleeped, because Curious Capitalist readers require more protection from profanity than FT readers do): If anything, the onscreen Gasparino is a toned-down version of the off-air one. One morning, he upset Lance Armstrong, the cyclist, by [...]
Tyler Cowen writes, in response to a Felix Salmon dismissal of financial innovation as “net, net … a bad thing,” I can understand that particular financial innovations might be bad, but financial innovation overall? Surely this claim was false in years 1200, 1900, and also 1950. (Of course you’ll find very harmful financial explosions between [...]
A reader in Kansas City writes: If income tax rate increases plus surcharges combine to push the effective rate for “the rich” up past 40 percent, won’t we likely see a dramatic DROP in the income of the top one percent? Presumably many of the business owners who now treat their corporate earnings as personal [...]
My new column, about the proposed Consumer Financial Protection, is online and in the issue of TIME with some astronaut dude on the cover.
The headline number from Citigroup’s second-quarter earnings release—$4.3 billion—is pretty staggering. Goldman Sachs only made $3.4 billion; JP Morgan Chase $2.7 billion. And those are the well-managed banks. Then you read to the second line of the earnings release and see that Citi booked a gain of $6.7 billion, after taxes, selling its retail brokerage, [...]
Yesterday we got word that the Fed now expects the U.S. unemployment rate to hit between 9.8% and 10.1% by the end of the year before starting to decline in 2010. In April, the Fed thought we’d top out between 9.2% and 9.6%. No cause for celebration there. But then this morning we received a [...]
First, Justin is about to take the mic at the Diane Rehm Show. You can listen live here. Second, the WSJ has named the Curious Capitalist one of the Top 25 Economics Blogs. I think that has a wee bit more to do with Justin than it has to do with me, but since I’m [...]
The consumer price index jumped 0.7% (seasonally adjusted) in June, the biggest monthly rise since last summer. Most of the gain came from rising gasoline prices: the CPI excluding food energy (what they call core inflation) was up only 0.2%. And prices overall are still down 1.4% from a year ago. This ain’t no inflationary [...]
When I saw the headline on my RSS reader it brought back all sorts of tech-bubble memories: F-Secure Pays €27.5 Million For French Storage Startup Steek, it read. Continued the TechCrunch Europe post: Finnish computer security provider F-Secure has acquired venture-backed French startup Steek for €27.5M in cash with the possibility of a further performance-based [...]
