The FT’s John Gapper thinks it would be a big mistake for Treasury to allow Goldman Sachs to pay its way out of the strictures of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. He writes:
[W]e now know unambiguously that Goldman is a “systemically important financial firm”. In other words, Goldman is too big to fail and would be bailed out by
…
There’s been a debate going on for a few years about whether the big rise in income inequality in the U.S. over the past three decades has been at least partly a political phenomenon or purely an economic one. The first camp, whose members include political scientist Larry Bartels and economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (pdf), …
My favorite Ghanaian libertarian think-tanker, Bright Simons, writes:
China isn’t in Africa merely to snap up raw materials, exploit African labor, or build geopolitical influence. Rather, its goals blend a combination of all the above with a need to beta-test future global brands, open new markets, enhance its soft power through
…
Back in January, the IRS issued a report (pdf) on the income tax returns of the 400 highest-income taxpayers in the U.S. I missed it when it came out, but I’ve been looking through it and it provides a nice, simple demonstration of the fallaciousness of Ari Fleischer’s argument about the tax burden. Fleischer bemoans the fact that the …
Consumer prices fell 0.4% from March 2008 to March 2009, the first such year-over-year decline since 1955. That’s the headline out of today’s inflation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As with almost all such headlines, though, it’s misleading. The big fall in prices actually came last October through December, as the global …
I was too sick to blog yesterday (big-time congestion + fever + I’m a wimp), and am still too sick to blog much today, but when I saw that the most-viewed piece on wsj.com is another one of Ari Fleischer’s muddle-headed screeds on taxes, I perked up at least a little. Ari Fleischer’s tax ideas always get my adrenaline flowing. His point …
The latest Sports Illustrated has a nice little reminiscence from Jariah Beard about his years of caddying (1979-1982) for Fuzzy Zoeller at the Masters. Before 1983, only Augusta locals were allowed to caddy at the tournament. Beard tells about the fun that was had in 1979, when Zoeller won the tournament on his first try, then
…
I heard this on my favorite Dutch radio show a while back, and when I discovered today that it’s on YouTube, I could not but share. It’s the Leonard Cohen song “Dance me to the end of love,” sung by Frisian singer-songwriter Elske de Wall and what appears to be her sister Femke. Sung in Frisian, of course (the new title, “Dunsje my de …
My new column is about the thrilling rebirth of the special drawing right, the currency of the International Monetary Fund. Need I say more?
One expert on the subject who was very helpful, but didn’t make it into the column, was C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Bergsten was extolling the …
I was walking up Broadway a couple days ago when I saw a BusinessWeek cover in the window of a magazine shop, illustrated with a couple of green shoots poking out of the ground, on “Signs of Life” in the housing market. So much for that housing bottom, I thought to myself.
The green shoots metaphor is now dominating economic coverage. I …
I’ve got a new TIME.com piece on the sudden, recession-caused disappearance of the subsidy the Social Security system has been providing to the rest of the federal government for the past quarter century. This had been projected to happen in 2017, but it turns out we didn’t have to wait. The man you all know as plukasiak tipped me off to …
TIME’s Massimo Calabresi has a really interesting little piece about the spectacular lack of interest in the latest round of Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility lending. TALF has $200 billion in potential funding. Last month it loaned $4.7 billion. This month, just $1.7 billion. Writes Massimo:
There are three possible reasons for
…
