Economist Willem Buiter has a reaction similar to mine to UK financial regulator Adair Turner’s suggestion that maybe we need a “Tobin tax” on financial transactions to shrink the financial sector down to size:
What problem would a Tobin tax on financial transactions solve? Lord Turner asserts, in an interview with Prospect magazine,
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Another fun thing I found on John Hempton’s blog. It’s an ad from back in the day for Kaupthing, the once high-flying, now effectively bankrupt Icelandic bank:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31U54cgf_OQ]
The catch-phrase of the first part of the ad—”We can, if we think we can”—is scary enough. Then there’s this bit:
We
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Yesterday, when I pointed to the signs that the Troubled Asset Relief Program could actually turn out to be a money-maker, I left Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of the discussion. Their rescue wasn’t part of TARP, for one thing, and for another I had no idea whether they had a shot of earning their way out of trouble. They’ve certainly …
It turns out Todd Purdum was paying regular visits to Hank Paulson at the Treasury Department over the course of 2007 and 2008. Now he’s put together what Paulson told him for a big Vanity Fair article. There’s nothing new in it, really, but it’s rich in fascinating detail that can better inform some of the big arguments of the past …
Dan Gross pointed it out Friday, and the NYT joins in today: The government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program is starting to look like a moneymaker—or at least no longer like a giant hole into which money is poured. Meanwhile, the FT reports that the Federal Reserve has made a $14 billion profit on its various crisis-fighting loan …
In Saturday’s FT, Martin Sandbu tells the amazing tale of Farouk al-Kasim, the Iraqi geologist who has been more responsible than anyone else for Norway’s success as an oil power.
[H]e and his Norwegian wife, Solfrid, had decided that their youngest son, born with cerebral palsy, could only receive the care he needed there. But it meant
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I think I have now more or less recovered from the Curious Capitalist family’s 11-day cross country road trip—although I still weigh about 10 pounds more than when we left. We traveled from the San Francisco Bay area to New York, stopping along the way for visits with family and friends in Lake City, Colo.; the Quad Cities of Illinois …
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM3MqseByeQ]
No major backstory here. Just seemed like “Home” was an appropriate song now that I’m home again.
I live in a very prosperous neighborhood of New York City, the Upper West Side, where the main thoroughfare, Broadway, is full of vacant storefronts. Except for a few recent restaurant closings, this isn’t a product of the recession—it was just as true a couple of years ago. I mainly blame the banks, which at the height of their …
I just taped an interview for CNN’s Your $$$$$, which airs at 1 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. If you watch you can also see Roland Martin and Richard Quest debating the merits of pocket squares (unless CNN chooses to cut that highly informative segment). My interview was about my book, so I won’t belabor it. But there was a …
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which insures $4.8 trillion in bank deposits, reported today that its insurance fund was down to $10.4 billion at the end of June.
This news generated some worried-sounding headlines. Think about it for a moment, though: If the resources available to insure $4.8 trillion in deposits (it’s actually …
We staggered back into NYC early this morning, cross-country road-trip completed. I’ll write something soon about the important things I learned sitting in a small-to-mid-sized SUV (we had a Mercury Mariner, then traded it in at the Moline Hertz for a Hyundai Santa Fe) for up to 14 hours a day. But for now, the first headline to catch my …
