In the comments sections, WilliamBanzai7 shares with us his latest subprime-debacle-inspired poem. The creative-writing major in me thought it worth a full post.
TARP, you’ll keep in mind, stands for Troubled Asset Relief Plan–what we heretofore have referred to as “the $700 billion bailout.”
Charge of the TARP Brigade
(inspired by …
We didn’t get much into Montana Democrat Jon Tester’s questions in the liveblogging of the Senate Banking hearing, but he was pretty entertaining. Plus he asked this (from Andrew Leonard):
Why do we have one week to determine $700 billion that has to be appropriated, or this country’s financial systems go down the pipes?
Wasn’t there
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The news late Tuesday that Warren Buffett was buying $5 billion in Goldman Sachs preferred stock was hailed in some quarters as a sign of a market bottom. It’s certainly likely to send Goldman shares skyrocketing tomorrow (they were up 6.5% in after hours trading) and will probably help the overall stock market as well. It’s also an …
As others have noted, one interestingly unexpected moment in today’s bailout hearings came when SEC Chairman Chris Cox mentioned the lack of any over-the-counter-derivatives regulation/oversight/disclosure as a possible cause of some of our current problems.
OTC derivatives, such as the credit default swaps so much in the news lately, …
David Cay Johnston thinks maybe we don’t need this bailout after all—and that journalists aren’t asking the right questions. That we’re at risk of “repeat[ing] the failed lapdog practices that so damaged our reputations in the rush to war in Iraq and the adoption of the Patriot Act.” On a web site of Harvard’s Neiman Foundation for …
The majority of Americans say they favor a Wall Street bailout, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has just reported. The question asked was:
As you may know, the government is potentially investing billions to try and keep financial institutions and markets secure. Do you think this is the right thing or the wrong
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Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke (and Chris Cox and James Lockhart, but do you think anybody really cares what they say?) are guests of the Senate Banking Committee this morning.
Paulson’s opening statement is here. Bernanke’s is here. They contain nothing newsworthy. Committee Chairman Chris Dodd and ranking Republican Dick Shelby are …
House prices are still falling! OFHEO is out with its latest numbers: Home values declined by 0.6% from June to July, and are down 5.3% from a year ago. For the month, prices fell in each of the nine Census divisions OFHEO tracks. That’s a change from prior months, in which home prices continued to appreciate in certain pockets, like the …
In the late 1990s, when the stock market was hot hot hot, there was a lot of talk about how the U.S. had become “shareholder nation.” This wasn’t total nonsense–stock ownership had broadened over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, mainly through the intermediaries of mutual funds and 401(k)s. But it was still restricted to only about …
John Hopkins economist Christopher Carroll examines the historical evidence on how the economy and the stock market perform better under Democratic administrations than Republican ones, and speculates:
The answer can’t be found by drilling down (so to speak) into the specific policy proposals of the two parties, which have evolved so
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From Alex Tabarrok. No further comment necessary:
Everything’s just so much calmer this morning. Last week it was which investment bank would go under tomorrow, now it’s what’s in the Senate draft of the bailout bill that maybe they’ll pass by the end of the week (the WSJ just broke the story that it calls for the government to get shares of financial firms participating in the …
