I was among friends the other night, listening to a doctor go off about how health care in this country costs so much because Americans are fat. If she had to see one more obese mother feed her already-overweight eight-year-old child Cheetos for breakfast, this doctor said, she was going to scream. Want to know [...]
A TARP chronology: Sept. 17, 2008: Lehman Brothers has just gone under, the financial world seems to be collapsing under our ears, and Nick Brady, Gene Ludwig and Paul Volcker propose in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the only thing that can save us is a “mechanism in place to remove” toxic real estate [...]
The news yesterday that John Meriwether had shut down his latest hedge fund, JWM Partners, wasn’t exactly news. Word got out back in February that the man behind legendary blowup Long-Term Capital Management was again in trouble, albeit of a less spectacular sort than 11 years ago (JWM’s main fund was down 44% from September [...]
So this ad for the Palm Pre comes on TV, and a strangely familiar tune comes on in the background. I think about it for a few minutes, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, it comes to me: Doot Doot.
Watching Congressional hearings on important topics always seems beforehand like it’s going to be a good idea. You know: Our elected representatives, asking the experts (or the culprits) the questions that need to be asked. Every once in a while it does work out this way: I thought the Senate Banking Committee’s hearings on the [...]
Microlending was one of the biggest parties in finance in recent years—an era of many parties. A new report out from the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (CSFI) details how things have changed over the past year-and-a-half. The report is based on a survey of 430 institututions in 82 countries and reveals that [...]
The indispensable Epicurean Dealmaker—whom I would surely hire if (a) I were in need of an investment banker and (2) I could figure out who he is—makes a rare defense of his kind: I stick by my assertion that we did not create the huge global demand for riskless returns that is at the root [...]
The announcement this morning (pdf!) by Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman Gary Gensler that his agency is considering imposing limits on the size of trades by energy futures speculators may amount to something of a landmark (or turning point, or whatever portentous phrase you prefer) in Washington’s relationship to financial markets. Gensler justified the move [...]
I’ve got a new story* up on Time.com about people intentionally defaulting on their mortgages. The piece begins: Up to 26% of U.S. homeowners who stop paying their mortgage may be doing so intentionally, not because they can’t make the payments but because they don’t want to put money into a house that’s worth less [...]
The WSJ has a story today about growing calls for another stimulus package. Bruce Bartlett has a column in the FT arguing that we don’t need one. Bartlett’s main point is that only a fraction of the stimulus money has been spent yet, and that fraction has been consisted mostly of what, according to the [...]
