In the past 20 minutes two different friends have emailed me to say they’re about to gather in their corporate auditoriums to watch the inauguration. We’ve got that going on here at Time Inc., too, though, you’ll notice, I’m still working away. Someone’s got to keep an eye on labor productivity.
For slightly more informed inauguration …
Joe Klein argues that the Republican talking point that Obama’s stimulus plan will cost $275,ooo per new job created is “phony-baloney propaganda.” I had actually been thinking it was the best anti-stimulus argument that John Boehner’s office had managed to come up with so far (which isn’t saying much, but it’s saying more than …
I have a new TIME.com piece up about George Bush’s eight biggest economic policy errors. It begins here, but it’s one of those irritating (but multiple page-view generating) galleries, so if you’d prefer to consume al a carte, here are the eight erroneous zones:
Roger Ehrenberg thinks it’s long past time for Treasury to bite the bullet on Citi:
What if, just what if, Treasury (together with the SEC) had said four months ago – game over, guys. Employ FAS 157 across your asset portfolios, show us exactly how broke you are, hand us the keys, we’ll settle accounts with those who are owed money and
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In October, JP Morgan Chase said that it would start more aggressively changing the terms of home loans in order to try to prevent foreclosures. At the time, I wondered if this might be taken as a sign that the free market still works—that federal programs forcing servicers to rewrite mortgages in order to keep them affordable might …
A couple of commenters have pointed me to Robert Reich’s list of “Criteria for TARP II.” Nos. 3-6 seem the most important:
3. Prohibit any bank that gets TARP II funds from issuing dividends, purchasing other companies, or paying off creditors.
4. Bar any bank that gets TARP II funds from paying its executives, traders, or directors
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Freddie Mac said today that the average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is down to 4.96%, the lowest rate on record (their records go back to 1971). In recent weeks, low mortgage rates have kicked up applications to refinance, though that’s not translating too smoothly into actual refis. This morning the WSJ had a great figure from …
When I interviewed Milton Friedman for my book back in 2004, I asked him at one point what he thought of behavioral economics.
“Oh, it’s great,” he said. I was surprised. Milton Friedman had been following the research being done by Dick Thaler and Colin Camerer and David Laibson and a zillion others working along the borders between …
Here’s the rundown on spending, courtesy of the House Appropriations Committee. My first take is that if you have spend $550 billion (the tax cuts will add up to $275 billion), it’s a sensible-enough plan for doing it. It’s a mix of things that make long-term sense (energy efficiency, infrastructure) and things that can have immediate …
Here is the smartest thing I’ve read yet about how to stabilize the housing market through loan modifications. If you want the short version, check out the testimony Columbia Business School’s Christopher Mayer gave in front of the House financial services committee on Tuesday.
The argument, made with colleagues Edward Morrison (from …
The Great Debate over whether we should cut taxes or increase government spending to stimulate the economy has sent many of us noneconomists digging into the evidence economists have gathered on the topic. Most of it is, as Nate Silver put it after reading Christina and David Romer’s big paper (pdf) on the macroeconomic effects of …
John Reed, who as CEO of Citicorp merged it with Sandy Weill’s Travelers Group just over a decade ago, admitted it last spring, telling the Financial Times that “the specific merger transaction clearly has to be seen to have been a mistake.” Now current Citi CEO Vikram Pandit—who has been talking to Reed on a pretty regular basis—has …
