The new issue of Jack Ciesielski’s Analyst’s Accounting Observer has a list of “20 Questions to Ask on Conference Calls.” He means quarterly earnings conference calls, and the questions are all related to the current financial and economic turmoil. You’ll have to pay Jack some big bucks if you want to know all 20, but the first two …
A Danish friend who watched the debate from Copenhagen sent me this e-mail last night. He was a little groggy–it was 5 a.m. his time–but I figured it was worth sharing:
[A]mericans don’t understand that you’re a part of a global economy and society. The whole world is struggling with financial problems mainly because of the
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University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan had a provocative piece on the New York Times op-ed page last Friday arguing that, financial crisis or no, the economy would be okay. The reason he’s so sure? The strong performance of a measure he calls marginal product of capital:
Since World War II, the marginal product of capital, after
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My column in the new TIME that goes on sale Friday (it’s got Lincoln, FDR, Obama and McCain on the cover) is already up online. It begins:
John McCain’s claim that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” uttered just before the financial crisis turned dire, may go down as one of the great blunders of presidential-campaign history.
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First of all, this was so much better than the other two McBama debates. I only watched about five minutes of the second one (I did watch all of the first, to my regret), but I can still say with confidence: This was the best. The format totally rocked. Bob Schieffer totally rocked. It was AN ACTUAL DEBATE. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
I’ll …
I wasn’t really paying attention, and I definitely wasn’t watching CNBC, but it appears the stock market had a pretty bad day–the Dow down 7.8%, the S&P 9%. As always, I think the main lesson here is that these are volatile times, and in volatile times you’ll get days like this.
But a pretty convincing narrative thread for the day’s …
Look, I’m not saying I’m Nouriel Roubini or anything. I don’t host a lot of fashion shows or dance parties at my apartment. And I didn’t predict the current financial crisis.
But as a congenital optimist who began to be filled with foreboding early in 2007, I did write a lot of stuff that does not look overly stupid at the moment. And …
I just heard Ari Fleischer say this on the Daily Show:
You can’t have a country that’s strong when you have 45% of the population not paying any income tax.
Does this man know anything about the history of the income tax? No, obviously not. So let me share a fun fact from the Treasury Department. In the early years of the federal income …
On Monday Barack Obama unveiled a less-than-compelling list of new economic proposals to combat these economic hard times. Now John McCain has his own new list, dubbed the Pension and Family Security Plan. And guess what! His proposals may be even less compelling than Obama’s! The three McCain ideas I hadn’t heard before are:
1. …
I mentioned in my post on Paul Krugman Monday that Greg Mankiw had told me years ago that he thought Krugman was a lock to win the Nobel one of these days. Greg said on his blog that he didn’t remember that, but it that sounded like something he would have said.
Well, it turns out my friend and former colleague Peronet Despeignes had a …
So now the plan is out. Treasury will spend $250 billion of the $700 billion Congress gave it a couple weeks ago recapitalizing the nation’s banks and thrifts, starting with nine of the biggest. That is, it will buy senior preferred shares that will pay a divided of 5% a share for the next five years and 9% a share after that, and also …
The WSJ is reporting that the bank-rescue plan to be unveiled by Treasury Tuesday will call for the government to spend the first $250 billion of its TARP stash buying equity stakes in banks–“potentially thousands of banks”–and for the FDIC to temporarily insure all non-interest-bearing deposits and new senior debt issued by banks and …
