This is off topic—although I guess it fits well with the new austerity—but I just blew 15 minutes on a friend’s mom’s website that tells me important things like how long is safe to keep an open bottle of blueberry preserves in the fridge (answer: one year). Or how about an open package of bacon? (3-5 days in the fridge, 1-2 months …
I’m not sure that I entirely understand all the points Hernando de Soto makes in his op-ed piece in the WSJ today, but this one sure is intriguing:
If you think about it, everything of value we own travels on property paper. At the beginning of the decade there was about $100 trillion worth of property paper representing tangible goods
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Alpha magazine’s annual list of the 25 highest-paid hedgies is out, and confirms the fascinating truth that there still are a lot of staggeringly high-paid hedgies out there—even if fewer than the year before. Atop the list, at an estimated $2.5 billion, is Jim Simons, who was one of the highest-paid hedgies before all this craziness …
This quote from Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition, by way of historian Eric Rauchway, is awfully interesting:
He was surprised and wounded at the way the upper classes turned on him…. Consider the situation in which he came to office. The economic machinery of the nation had broken down…. People who had anything
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I’m participating in a discussion of Matt Miller’s new book, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, which I’ve gushed about here already, over at the TPMCafe Book Club this week. Here’s my first post:
When I was reading through the seven Dead Ideas in Matt’s book, I got most excited about “Your Company Should Take Care of You” and “Taxes Hurt the …
I gave up on trying to understand politics a long time ago (when I was a political reporter at The Birmingham News and was constantly getting scooped by rivals who had a far better sense than I of what was political dynamite in Alabama and what was not). So I found Jay Newton-Small’s explanation of why the congressional outrage over …
Matthew Yglesias wonders if the ferocity of Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz‘s criticisms of the Geithner plan can be explained by the apparent fact they haven’t been briefed/consulted by the Obama administration. I dunno, I sort of get the feeling that Paul and Joe prefer not being briefed, because being briefed means to a certain extent …
Late in the House Financial Services Committee hearing today with Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke and Bill Dudley, California Democrat Joe Baca asked Bernanke an interesting question: When did the financial system break? What year did everything go bad? Bernanke demurred, but I have an answer: 2003, or maybe 2004.
It was late in 2003 that …
A certain Nemo has put together a nice illustration of how exactly the structure of the Legacy Loans Program that Treasury announced yesterday amounts to a big subsidy to private investors, and Felix Salmon and Paul Krugman have given it wider currency. It’s a great post, and a clear illustration both of how option-pricing works and how …
The WSJ reports that People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan has:
called for the creation of a new currency to eventually replace the dollar as the world’s standard, proposing a sweeping overhaul of global finance that reflects developing nations’ growing unhappiness with the U.S. role in the world economy.
This is not a new idea. …
James Surowiecki nails something that also bothers me about many of the critiques of the Geithner plan:
Much of the discourse around the Geithner plan, and around the nationalization debate more generally, seems to assume that Obama’s economic policymakers don’t understand the gravity of the situation or the virtues of
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In a comment to my post channeling John Hempton’s idea that the Treasury’s new asset purchase plan could be a step along the path to a better-informed selective nationalization of banks, tc125231 writes:
Please explain why saying nationalization without this expensive subsidy of a few entities consitutes a “dagger at the heart of
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