Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is going to propose (to his colleagues in the Group of 20 nations), that banks—especially really big ones—be subject to much higher capital requirements. Adair Turner, chairman of the U.K. Financial Services Authority, wants big banks to have to prepare “living wills” that lay out how they will be wound down [...]
Thanks to a Tweet from Joi Ito, I discovered that the great Dutch journalist and Japan expert Karel van Wolferen now has a blog. Or “Jottings,” as Van Wolferen calls it. Joi was linking to a jotting about the significance of Sunday’s election, but I quickly found my way to a long, undated essay on [...]
Economist Willem Buiter has a reaction similar to mine to UK financial regulator Adair Turner’s suggestion that maybe we need a “Tobin tax” on financial transactions to shrink the financial sector down to size: What problem would a Tobin tax on financial transactions solve? Lord Turner asserts, in an interview with Prospect magazine, that the [...]
Another fun thing I found on John Hempton’s blog. It’s an ad from back in the day for Kaupthing, the once high-flying, now effectively bankrupt Icelandic bank: The catch-phrase of the first part of the ad—”We can, if we think we can”—is scary enough. Then there’s this bit: We thought we could double in size [...]
Yesterday, when I pointed to the signs that the Troubled Asset Relief Program could actually turn out to be a money-maker, I left Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of the discussion. Their rescue wasn’t part of TARP, for one thing, and for another I had no idea whether they had a shot of earning [...]
It turns out Todd Purdum was paying regular visits to Hank Paulson at the Treasury Department over the course of 2007 and 2008. Now he’s put together what Paulson told him for a big Vanity Fair article. There’s nothing new in it, really, but it’s rich in fascinating detail that can better inform some of [...]
