I was walking up Broadway a couple days ago when I saw a BusinessWeek cover in the window of a magazine shop, illustrated with a couple of green shoots poking out of the ground, on “Signs of Life” in the housing market. So much for that housing bottom, I thought to myself.
The green shoots metaphor is now dominating economic coverage. I …
I’ve got a new TIME.com piece on the sudden, recession-caused disappearance of the subsidy the Social Security system has been providing to the rest of the federal government for the past quarter century. This had been projected to happen in 2017, but it turns out we didn’t have to wait. The man you all know as plukasiak tipped me off to …
TIME’s Massimo Calabresi has a really interesting little piece about the spectacular lack of interest in the latest round of Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility lending. TALF has $200 billion in potential funding. Last month it loaned $4.7 billion. This month, just $1.7 billion. Writes Massimo:
There are three possible reasons for
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The news, reported by Eric Dash in the NYT, that the stress tests of 19 big banks are almost all done and none of the 19 will be due for an immediate FDIC takeover as a result has been greeted in the financial blogosphere with all manner of hooting and moaning and groaning.
I get the mockery, but I also sort of don’t, given that it was …
Wells Fargo announced this morning that it made a lot of money in the first quarter—”approximately $3 billion.” As I wrote last month when Citi let slip that its January and February looked pretty good, this shouldn’t be all that big a surprise: Federal Reserve liquidity programs and FDIC guarantees have sharply lowered banks’ funding …
The WaPo’s Steven Pearlstein, reviewing Lloyd Blankfein’s big speech in D.C. yesterday, nails the two big blind spots that even an enlightened Wall Streeter like Blankfein can’t seem to rid himself of:
The most important is culture — in the case of Wall Street, a culture that not only tolerates but almost celebrates taking advantage of
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Jed Graham, who covers economic policy for Investor’s Business Daily, has been writing occasional how-to-fix-the-mortgage-market essays for RGE Monitor since last fall. His most recent (it’s about 10 days old, but who’s counting?) begins:
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s toxic asset plan is a brilliant, highly complex and very
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A little over a year ago, I invited readers to suggest names for this financial crisis we (still) find ourselves in. Despite getting lots of great suggestions here and elsewhere, I never pulled the trigger and picked a winner. I was probably right not to do so—I was looking not so much for the funniest name as for one that might stick, …
Eventually, if I keep trying hard enough, I will find a way to make these two lines converge:
In a comment to my last chart comparing job losses now to those in the early 1930s, plukasiak wrote:
the problem I have with this chart is that it conflates “job peak” with the beginning of comparable periods — but the 2008 recession was
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I like the reading suggestions I get from readers, so I clicked through on bryanfromhouston’s link to this piece by Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald made his name exposing the Bush administration’s disdain for the Constitution and the media’s lame coverage of the Bush administration, and apparently plans to stick with that theme for the rest …
My first stab at comparing non-farm payroll employment declines in the current recession with those from the Great Depression was beset by a couple of flaws. One was that I was using seasonally adjusted numbers from the current recession while the figures from the 1930s were unadjusted. That was easy enough to fix. The other was that …
Two economists’ missives to clients just arrived in my e-mail inbox, and they make for an interesting pair.
Goldman Sachs chief U.S. economist Jan Hatzius, in a note titled “More Signs of Stabilization,” writes:
A sharp improvement from the current pace is very likely, and a pickup from -7% in Q1 to -1% in H2 looks about equally likely
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