The news that AIG CEO Robert Benmosche is thinking of leaving (now he says he’s staying; see update below) because he’s sick of dealing with those mean, mean federal regulators—especially the ones who want to cap his and his employees’ pay—raised two conflicting thoughts: 1) The federal government isn’t very good at running corporations. 2) [...]
BlackRock’s Larry Fink, who you’d have to say has emerged as one of the winners from the financial crisis, says we shouldn’t worry all too much about too-big-to-fail financial firms staying too big to fail. That’s because the feds are already shrinking them. “They are doing that by reducing leverage,” he said at a breakfast [...]
As part of my frightening yet potentially lucrative new career as a Person Who Sits/Stands at the Front of the Room and Says Stuff While Other People Sit in Chairs and Listen Semi-Attentively, I’m on a panel tonight at the Barnes & Noble at Broadway and 66th in Manhattan with Bruce Bartlett, Robert Samuelson and [...]
My new column is up online and in the issue of TIME with our Secretary of State on the cover. It’s about money.
Titan of academic finance Gene Fama writes in his blog: The premise of the Fox book is that our current economic problems are largely due to blind acceptance of the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH), which posits that market prices reflect all available information. The claim is that the world’s investors and their advisors in the [...]
There’s been a lot of chatter recently about whether or not the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) is going to need a bailout. The FHA insures—but does not write—home loans, and thanks to the housing bust, the agency has had to dip a little further into its reserves than it probably would have liked to. That [...]
Last week I greeted a couple pieces of good economic news, the reports that GDP grew 3.5% in the third quarter and house prices rose 1.2% in August, with a shrug and worries that things might be about to take a turn for the worse. So it seems only fair to point out that, this [...]
The CBO has a new “economic and budget issue brief” out on one of our favorite subjects, federal support for housing. The gist: there’s a lot of it.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports* that $50,000 is quickly becoming the typical cost for a year at one of the nation’s elite colleges: Fifty-eight private colleges now charge at least that much for tuition, fees, room, and board, a Chronicle analysis of College Board data shows. Last year only five colleges did. Talk about [...]
Really no commentary necessary, other than that I learned of it via Christopher Hayes (via a couple other people) on the Twitter:
