My new column is in the issue of TIME with Nelson Mandela on the cover and online here. It begins:
Barney Frank is on the line. I ask the Massachusetts Democrat, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, if he thinks the housing bill that he and Senator Chris Dodd are on the verge of pushing through Congress will really do much
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Politically speaking, Phil Gramm’s “mental recession” remark was about the dumbest thing imaginable–which is why the McCain camp is running away from it as fast as it can (I liked McCain’s “Ambassador to Belarus” remark). But taken on purely economic terms his comments to the Washington Times weren’t all crazy. A quick run-through, …
Three weeks from today, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis is going to release its advance estimate of third-quarter gross domestic product. The current thinking of most several two of the economic forecasters whose stuff I read–sure to be bolstered by the better-than-expected June sales numbers being reported by many …
The WSJ is reporting that people in the Bush administration are beginning to talk seriously–albeit of course entirely hypothetically–“about what to do in the event mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac falter.”
The view from outside the administration is pretty straightforward, the paper reports:
If a loss of confidence among
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Yesterday, I wrote about Boone Pickens’s plan to plaster the center of the country with windmills. He’s on a PR blitz, trying to convince the country and its politicians—especially those two guys running for President—that we need to go hog wild into wind energy. (Could maybe have something to do with the massive wind farm he’s …
Josh Marshall has an outraged little post this morning on something that John McCain said about Social Security the other day:
McCain told a townhall in Denver on Monday, “Americans have got to understand that. Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today.
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A reader asked me a while back what I thought of this little article by my former Fortune colleague Jon Birger about onions:
The bulbous root is the only commodity for which futures trading is banned. Back in 1958, onion growers convinced themselves that futures traders (and not the new farms sprouting up in Wisconsin) were responsible
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Reading through Ben Bernanke’s speech today about “Financial Regulation and Financial Stability” is enough to give a person whiplash. One second he’s calling for actions to crack down on reckless lending. The next he’s calling for more reckless lending. He’s a good cop/bad cop partnership, all contained in one mild-mannered Fed …
In the last Presidential election, Texas-oilman-turned-corporate-raider-turned-alternative-energy-believer T. Boone Pickens plowed money into the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth—even offering to pay $1 million to anyone who could disprove a single claim from one of the group’s John-Kerry-bashing TV ads.
This election cycle he’s …
Mark Thoma has a lengthy and meaty roundup of various appalled reactions to John McCain’s half-baked pledge to balance the budget by 2013. He points out that, in April:
Sen. McCain … backed off his earlier promise to eliminate the budget deficit by the end of his first term and now says it may take two terms.
But the best analysis …
John McCain promises, in an exciting new 15-page briefing paper that you can download as a pdf or consume in video form, that he’s going to balance the federal budget in just four years:
John McCain will balance the budget by the end of his first term. The near-term path to balance is built on three principles:
• Reasonable economic
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I already knew that the subprime mortgage boom of 2003-2006 had taken a lot of business away from the Federal Housing Administration. But looking through the actual numbers in a June 2007 GAO report on the FHA’s declining market share (pdf!) was still a revelation. In the housing bubble epicenters of Arizona, California, and Nevada in …
