Samantha Power makes me acutely aware of my shortcomings.
Unless you travel in certain hifalutin circles, you probably never gave her much thought or notice until this month. She’s a journalist/academic/human-rights activist who is one of the world’s leading thinkers on genocide. She’s one of Barack Obama’s senior foreign policy …
Goldman and Lehman reported better-than-expected results this morning, stock markets opened on a decided upswing, and “the iTraxx Europe, which measures the cost of protecting 125 investment-grade credits against default, fell about 17 basis points to 143bp.” (No I don’t entirely know what that means either, but it sounds good.) Which …
I totally feel for the workers at Bear Stearns. Sure, my annual salary probably equals the lunch budget for the summer interns. And I bet their company cafeteria serves sushi every day—and real sushi, not some b.s. involving avocado and spam.
But to watch your retirement savings go up in smoke—and to realize simultaneously that your …
Paul Krugman writes:
Justin Fox suggests that we learn from the way Sweden dealt with its financial crisis at the beginning of the 90s. I’m looking into it.
What Justin doesn’t mention, however, is that (according to Reinhart and Rogoff [pdf!] ) the resolution of Sweden’s financial crisis imposed a fiscal burden — that is,
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With markets now closed for the day, you’d have to say the Fed’s frantic actions of the weekend–engineering the fire sale of Bear Stearns, cutting the discount rate and creating yet another “lending facility”–were successful. Stock markets didn’t collapse (Dow up slightly, S&P 500 and Nasdaq down), and, much more importantly, credit …
Bear Stearns’s share price went from $145 a year ago to $57 last week to $30 Friday to $3.82 this afternoon. That’s still $1.82 above the $2 a share JP Morgan Chase has offered to buy Bear (hope springs eternal, I guess), but it ain’t much. Now the FT’s Alphaville blog reports that “spurious” rumors are devastating the share price of …
See, I’m not the only one pushing the Swedish solution! From Merrill Lynch North American economist David Rosenberg’s Morning Call Notes today:
The Japanese credit crisis is usually cited as the benchmark for what not to do. But few cite Sweden’s crisis as a template on what might actually work. … the Swedish authorities realized early
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I’m getting a lot of pitches lately from this expert or that, offering to enlighten us (meaning me and thereby you) on recession-proofing your career. A lot of media outlets are taking the bait, judging by the meme wave of articles purporting to tell us such secrets. Which made me wonder: just exactly what does qualify a line of work as …
Today’s looking like the most fraught day yet in the rolling financial crisis of 07-08(-09?). Yeah, U.S. stock prices are up as of 10:50 a.m. But despite the continuing tendency of CNBC (and most of the rest of the financial media) to focus on the Dow and the S&P, they’re not what really matter here. This is a credit crisis, not a stock …
So JP Morgan Chase is buying Bear Stearns, for what everybody’s reporting to be somewhere in the $230-$250 million range.
That’s significantly less than Bear Stearns’ newish headquarters building at 383 Madison Ave.–a few blocks from JP Morgan Chase’s HQ–would fetch. Estimates Bloomberg:
The 1.2 million-square-foot, 45-story structure
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We’re back to Bear Stearns, where it all began. Last summer, it was the collapse of a couple of mortgage-security hedge funds run by the investment bank that sent credit markets into their first true tizzy. Now a Fed-backed temporary bailout of Bear means the 85-year-old firm may not survive much longer as an independent entity.
Bear …
I have two pieces in the new issue of Time with a “10 ideas that are changing the world” on the cover. One of them is one of those 10 ideas, really less an idea than an incipient trend, which I called “The New Austerity.” It begins:
Journalists and others with a tendency to see glasses as half empty have a long history of pronouncing the
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