After writing my post yesterday wondering why it was news that Ben Bernanke thinks the recession is over, I discovered that the Brookings Institution has online a transcript of the Q&A in which Bernanke said it. In context, he sounds awfully unbullish. Not bearish either, but … Bernanke’s words came in response to a question [...]
Phil Coggan of The Economist tells of a survey by Lipper (I can’t find it online) on mutual fund fees: The average total expense ratios of US mutual funds are 1.32%, for German funds 1.57% and for UK funds 1.66%. Weight the ratios by asset size (to reflect where the bulk of investor money is [...]
First American CoreLogic has taken a look at the effect of the government’s efforts to drive down mortgage interest rates, which, among other things, makes for easier refinancing. According to the loan analytics company, in the first half of 2009, refinancing homeowners set themselves up to save some $11.5 billion over the next five years. [...]
Example #389 of why I’m never going to make it in the news business: Yesterday afternoon, TIME.com’s business editor, John Curran, recommended that I take a look at Ben Bernanke’s speech at the Brookings Institution. I glanced at the text, saw that it was an exact repeat of the speech he’d given at Jackson Hole [...]
Bruce Judson doesn’t buy the argument, made on the front page of the WSJ last week, that “the deepest downturn in the U.S. economy since the Great Depression may finally shrink the gap between the very best-off Americans and everyone else.” Yes, the highest incomes do tend to drop sharply during market downturns, thus reducing [...]
Karen Tumulty has the story of the year: As you can imagine, Buffett was hearing from a lot of people on that crazy weekend exactly a year ago, when the financial world was falling apart. AIG, desperate to come up with $18 billion, begged him for help. “Don’t waste your time on me,” he told [...]
Economist Hyman Minsky, who never got much attention while he was alive, has become one of the big celebrities of this financial crisis. In Sunday’s Boston Globe, Stephen Mihm has the best account of Minsky’s life and significance that I’ve seen so far. A sample: Today most economists, it’s safe to say, are probably reading [...]
I’ve got a Lehman Day piece up on TIME.com about what the heck we’ve learned over the past year. Meanwhile, I’m still working this morning on a longer version for the magazine. So if there’s anything egregiously wrong with the online article, please let me know so I can fix it.
That’s Naomi Klein signing books, and me waiting expectantly for someone to bring me a book to sign, at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday (supereditor Ben Loehnen took the photo, with my camera). A few people did ask me to sign their books, and the guy running the Book Court tent asked me to [...]
