I’ve been meaning for a while to put a plug in here for Arnold Kling, who has delivered some of the most consistently provocative commentary on the financial freakout over the past couple of months. Much of Kling’s appeal has to with his possibly unique-on-this-planet combination of knowledge, experience and attitude. He’s a product of …
A way to feel morally superior to the people in the next county over
The New York Fed has a neat new interactive map where you can check credit card and mortgage delinquency rates by county. Here’s a screen grab:
I’d like to give a shout out to the people of Calhoun Co., Illinois—all 5,000 of you—because according to the New York Fed, you are completely on time with both your credit card and …
Recession-proof job? Ain’t no such thing
Bet you’re not losing a whole lot of sleep worrying about the career prospects of those poor folks on Wall Street who sold mortgage-backed bonds or those down-on-their-luck execs at AIG. I wouldn’t, either, except that I’m related to them.
I have two brothers. One has spent his career selling and trading securitized debt for big …
Alan Greenspan, Keynesian
For several years now, a few smart people–Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach is the first to spring to mind, but there were others–have been arguing that the Federal Reserve ought to do more to rein in the creation of asset price bubbles. Alan Greenspan, after making a tentative attempt at bubble management with his famous “irrational …
We now return you to Crisis Watch 2008: loan modification edition
Yesterday I wrote a story for Time.com about how loan modifications aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. You can read it here.
Since we like our web stories short, I didn’t have as much space as I might have liked to quote the evidence behind my conclusion—that loan modifications, at least the way they’re being done at the moment, …
In a freefall economy, does work-life balance tip over?
A cosmetologist friend thinks it might. She’s a mother of two whose current profession allows her flexible hours and enjoyable work (if you think scraping dead skin cells off a stranger’s face is a good time). Her employer doesn’t offer benefits or high pay, though, so what with the shaky state of things, she’s thinking of taking on a …
We interrupt Crisis Watch 2008 to bring you this important message
If I may so bold as to post on a topic other than financial meltdown, I would like to take a moment to respond to a question about TV advertising. Well, not a question as much as something someone said in a comments section of a web site, and not TV as much as the TV-show portal Hulu.com—a.k.a. the best web site ever. (If you’re one of …
The TED spread drops below 3, and other signs of the receding apocalypse
When last I checked, the Official Financial Indicator of the Panic of ’08, the TED spread, had dropped below 3. The TED spread measures the gap in interest rates between three-month T bills and three-month LIBOR, and it hasn’t closed below 3 since Sept. 26. Of course, it was in the 1 to 1.1 range in the weeks before the Lehman …
Zogby comes calling
The call came Saturday evening before dinner. Curious Capitalist Jr. (who is 9) picked up. The caller asked to speak to a grownup. He handed the phone to Mrs. Curious Capitalist.
Mrs. CC sat there answering questions for a while. From the answers, they seemed like very strange questions. After a while CC Jr. came to me in the kitchen, …
Another bear (Jeremy Grantham) turns a little bit bullish
I quoted the warnings of veteran money manager Jeremy Grantham a couple of times in the lead-up to the current financial mess. My favorite came in July 2007 when Grantham described the minor jitters that had hit markets several times already that year:
Rather like a brontosaurus that has been bitten on the tail and most of the body
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Explaining the oil-gasoline price disconnect
For obvious reasons, I’ve been getting a lot more reader e-mail than I used to. Which is great, except that I’m now way behind in answering. So here’s a good one one from a week ago that has only gotten more relevant with the passage of time:
One of the economic issues that really disturbs me is the movement in gasoline prices. Over the
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Martin Wolf: It began with the Asian currency crises, and it’s ending with the close of the Reagan-Thatcher era
As already noted here, FT economics columnist Martin Wolf has a new book out called Fixing Global Finance. It’s not really about the current crisis, but it is about the giant imbalances in global capital flows that Wolf thinks were the biggest cause of the current crisis. I went to a breakfast with Wolf on Thursday, and he explained with …