My sister Emy and I visited with the pastor of our local parish yesterday to hand over a wad of cash. In Japanese funerals, guests offer up money as a condolence gift, and our mother had insisted it go to charity. Her longtime church is to be one recipient, and so we take this thick envelope to Father Sakurai. He was the one who visited …
A couple of Swedes say we’re doing an okay job with our financial crisis
Bo Lundgren and Lars Hörngren know financial crises. Lundgren was Sweden’s Minister of Fiscal and Financial Affairs during the epic bank meltdown that hit the country in the early 1990s; Hörngren was an adviser to the governor of Sweden’s central bank. Now they both work at the country’s National Debt Office (Lundgren is director …
Why don’t we just allow the market to work?
Bryan from Houston, who’s been asking a lot of good questions lately, wonders apropos of the Frannie bailout:
Why don’t we just allow the market to work? In my mind, this will bring everything back into equilibrium.
But what if there isn’t just one possible equilibrium? Then the choice becomes, Do you want the equilibrium with house …
Name that city
Manhattan, Riverside Park, Sept. 7
Freddie Mac becomes a small-cap stock
The giant lender, with a mortgage book of $2.2 trillion, has seen its stock market capitalization drop below $1 billion this morning. Fannie Mae is still above the $1 billion threshhold, but not by much.
Monday morning Franniebacking
Four interesting things I’ve read this morning about the big renationalization Fanniefredderung:
From former Freddie Mac employee Arnold Kling:
If I were the czar of the mortgage market, I would attempt to bring back the 30-year amortizing fixed-rate mortgage with a 20 percent down payment. … I think that a housing market that is
…
Why are we doing this bailout again?
Several commenters to my last post wondered why the heck Hank Paulson & Co. think they need to bail out Fannie and Freddie. I’ll give Paulson’s answer, then translate:
These Preferred Stock Purchase Agreements were made necessary by the ambiguities in the GSE Congressional charters, which have been perceived to indicate government
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Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rejoin the federal government
Can someone explain why the government created companies that are now run by private shareholders? I’m having trouble understanding what the advantage is. Taxpayers are still clearly at risk so it seems that the shareholders can capitalize and then, should something go wrong, taxpayers will have to bail them out. Wouldn’t it be better to
…
Now we get to see what Paulson has in store for Fannie and Freddie
Back in July, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson asked Congress to trust him to deal with the troubles at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He got his way, in the form of legislation that gave him more a less a blank check to bail out and reorganize the giant mortgage lenders. “The more flexibility I have, the more confidence that gives to the …
My maternity leave thus far
I’ve been composing this blog post in my head for so long and now that I’m here, typing, my mind is completely blank. I suppose I’ll simply tell you what I’ve been up to so far on my maternity leave:
1. I had a baby.
2. I took my family to Japan.
3. I lost my mother.
All three things happened in such quick succession that I have yet to …
Exposing the Palin-Schrempp connection
The cover of the latest issue of TIME:
The cover of Business Week’s European edition, Nov. 16, 1998:
No, Sarah Palin and former DaimlerChryslerBenz CEO Jürgen Schrempp aren’t wearing exactly the same glasses. But they’re similar, no?
Still, I’m not gonna accuse Palin of wanton cosmopolitanism: Angular, rimless glasses were a …
GDP vs. everything else
So it is a recession, or isn’t it? Personally I’m starting to find the whole discussion extremely tiring. But it has political implications, and this morning’s employment report seems to help answer the question, so here goes:
Yeah, we seem to be in a recession. Although it’s still a lot milder than I and a lot of other people would …