Barbara’s post last week about the spectacular (and historic) proliferation of days in which the S&P 500 has moved 5% or more this year raised a couple of questions. The data she cited just went back to 1950, so one question was, how does this year’s volatility compare with that of the 1930s? Another was, why the heck is it happening? …
It was family movie night at the Curious Capitalists, and amid all the economic gloom I feel compelled to point out that a nation that can produce The School of Rock is a nation that cannot kept down for long.
I’m watching the House Financial Services Committee hearing on the auto bailout, but I’m not going to give it the extensive treatment that I gave to yesterday’s Senate hearing. The House hearings are almost never as good as the Senate ones anyway, and I’ve got other stuff to do. I will write something later about the drama in …
The November employment report is out, and it’s bad: The unemployment rate is up to 6.7% from 6.5%, which doesn’t sound so horrible at all. But payroll employment is down an estimated 533,000, which is much more than most economists were expecting and is, well, a lot of people.
What it still isn’t is a historic drop: It’s yet another …
The CEOs of the Detroit Three have successfully navigated the roads between Michigan and Washington, D.C., in their hybrid vehicles, and arrived at the hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. UAW chief Ron Gettelfinger is there too, but I’m assuming he was sensible enough to fly Northwest. It’s their second try at pleading …
My latest column is online and in the issue of TIME with something about Detroit on the cover that won’t be on newsstands until tomorrow. It begins:
Teresa Ghilarducci has always had more interesting — and controversial — things to say than your average retirement-policy wonk. An economist who moved this year from the University of
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In Thursday’s FT, John Gapper does a very nice job of threading the needle on The Great Bob Rubin Question:
Mr Rubin needs to find a way to make up for his part in Citi’s downfall. My suggestion is that, in addition to giving up his bonus for this year and last, he returns, or gives to a good cause, the bonuses he got in 2005 and 2006,
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Arnold Kling, riffing on something I wrote the other day about the end of investment banking as we’ve known it, writes:
I think of securitization as like the dead parrot in the famous Monty Python sketch. Trying to rescue it or revive it strikes me as madness. I keep saying that we need to revert to the mortgage finance system of forty
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General Motors has submitted its 37-page “Restructuring Plan for Long-Term Viability” (a.k.a. request for an $18 billion bailout) to Congress. There’s still a lot of defensive hey-we’re-already-totally-competitive-so-just-lay-off stuff in it (16-17 pages worth, I’d say), and of course a lot fuel-efficiency-is-job-one stuff to appease the …
Alan Mullaly will be driving in a Ford Escape hybrid. Rick Wagoner will travel in a Chevy Malibu hybrid. Bob Nardelli hasn’t figured out how he’ll get there yet, but taking a private jet is out of the question. It’s not quite carpooling in a minivan, as I suggested they do a couple weeks ago, but it’s close enough.
It’s mostly silly …
Having made the argument a couple of months back that repealing the Glass-Steagall Act was a good thing because it allowed J.P. Morgan Chase to buy Bear Stearns and Bank of America to (maybe) buy Merrill Lynch, I’ve been feeling a little guilty about not having revisited it yet in light of Citigroup’s troubles. So here goes:
It was the …
The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the semi-official arbiter of whether we’re in a recession or not, has finally made the call:
The committee determined that a peak in economic activity occurred in the U.S. economy in December 2007. The peak marks the end of the expansion that began in
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