On the sad occasion of the death of Doris “Tanta” Dungey, I’ve been hunting through her classic collection of Compleat Ubernerd posts about the mortgage business for some commemorative excerpts. But the whole point of these long, mostly brilliant essays on the workings of REMICs, TACs, PACs, CDOs, ABSes and the like is that they are …
So after all the worrying, the first weekend of Christmas shopping turned out to be … okay. From CNNMoney:
The National Retail Federation (NRF), an industry trade group, said shoppers spent $41 billion in the 4-day Thanksgiving weekend. The average shopper spent $372.57, up 7.2% from the $347.55 spent last year.
What we’ve seen so …
The future seems especially uncertain at the moment. There are those who would object that the future is always uncertain, and that it is when we think we’ve captured it in our forecasting models that we’ve invariably gotten things terribly wrong. But still, it is possible most of the time to be reasonably confident that one knows the …
There’s an article with my name on it in the new issue of TIME (with Michelle Rhee on the cover). My involvement with it was extremely limited–Massimo Calabresi and Michael Duffy in the Washington bureau did almost all the work–but it seemed rude to ask to have my byline removed. Plus, it’s a perfectly good article. Why not get the …
That’s the view from the front door of the house in semi-upstate New York that the Curious Capitalists have rented and stuffed with assorted in-laws for Thanksgiving. Happily, the house is well insulated.
Here’s hoping your turkey is well brined, salted, seasoned, whatever. Even if you live outside the Thanksgiving zone.
In the opening chapter of his great history of the Federal Reserve, Secrets of the Temple, William Greider describes Jimmy Carter’s choice of Paul Volcker as Fed chairman in 1979 in epochal terms:
At that moment, few in the White House appreciated what would become obvious in the next few years, that this was the most important
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The President-elect has announced the appointment of yet another slate of high-profile economic advisers, the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, with Paul Volcker as chairman and long-time Obama guy Austan Goolsbee as the head staff guy. So there’s that, the National Economic Council headed by Larry Summers, the Council on …
Maybe it’s because I’m an “economic leader.” At least, that’s what it says on the cover of this new book:
The book grew out of the Creative Capitalism blog that Michael Kinsley and Conor Clarke organized over the summer. My contribution was previously posted here. Making a book out of a blog seemed kind of pointless to me at first, …
The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index rose a bit this month, after hitting an all-time low in October (the measure goes back to 1967). I don’t know that it means all that much, but it is an indication of something that should start playing out more broadly in economic data releases–and perhaps injecting a touch of optimism into …
I think it’s pretty clear what Barack Obama was up to in choosing Tim Geithner to be his Treasury Secretary and Larry Summers his chief White House economic adviser. He knows we’re in a serious economic crisis, and he wants people who know what they’re doing and can get stuff done, quickly.
As for Summers, who has got to be the first …
Imagine there was this industry–Industry A–that had been flying high for years. It benefited from major regulatory shifts, and changes in the tax code. Its employees were the highest paid of any industry. Then it landed in a crisis entirely of its own making. It had been manufacturing defective products and selling them around the …
There are a lot of parallels between the deal unveiled overnight to restore confidence in Citigroup and the terms of the FDIC-arranged merger with Wachovia from September that never went through. A big pool of assets (now $306 billion, then $312 billion) is set aside, Citi agrees to take the hit on the first few billion (now $29 billion, …
