I did an appearance on the Real News Network, a web TV operation currently based out of Toronto but planning a move to D.C. to take on the “industrial-military complex” in person. Part one is now online. (I could embed it here, but it’s pretty long.) The other guest was Jim Stanford, chief economist with the Canadian Auto Workers union. …
I’ve got a piece up on TIME.com about the current race-to-the-bottom in GDP projections. It begins:
Just how far and how fast will the economy drop this quarter? There’s lately been a race to the bottom among forecasters, with the economists at Goldman Sachs leading the way. Early in the week, they put out a report saying that -3.5%
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NBC is reporting that, in one of the least surprising choices of recent days, Barack Obama is going to tap Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary. Former Treasury chief Larry Summers had been the subject of the most discussion in recent weeks, mainly because he’s said so many entertaining things through the years, but the actual betting was …
I’ve got a new column online and in the issue of TIME with a tongue depressor (and a tongue) on the cover. It begins:
The phenomenon we now know as Chapter 11 bankruptcy was born during the financial panics that regularly pummeled the U.S. economy in the 1800s. Railroads had emerged as the country’s first large industrial corporations,
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I’ve been getting a steady stream of traffic over the past couple of days to a post I wrote in May 2007 titled Ha ha ha Mark Cuban ha ha ha. It was about the Warriors’ glorious upset of Cuban’s Mavs in the NBA playoffs that year. The people landing there now all presumably want to read about Cuban’s insider trading mess, and I feel bad …
So the Detroit bailout will have to wait, at least until December. Nancy Pelosi said it was because lawmakers wanted to see a plan for how GM, Chrysler and Ford would spend the money. Then there was that other reason:
[W]hatever support they found sagged when it became known that each of them had flown into Washington aboard
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So, as reported, I turned the book manuscript in Monday. Now I need a subtitle. There are those who think I need a title. I disagree, but I’ll get to that. The title of the book is The Myth of the Rational Market. The current subtitle, which is left over from the days that the people at Collins were thinking our best shot was to market …
Long-time reader and Australian-TV-personality-on-the-rise Marcus has a question:
Given the whole debate about the US auto industry and the fact that one of their massive ongoing costs is health care, why the hell isn’t corporate America out there campaigning 24/7 for universal, state funded health care?
Surely one of the reasons that
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So I watched the auto companies’ CEOs ask Congress for money. In fact, I watched almost all four hours of Tuesday’s beg-a-thon before the Senate Banking Committee. I didn’t blog about it because I was frantically struggling to tease a magazine column out of it. Now that’s done, and I want to share one thing I learned: The car CEOs and …
I had CSPAN on so I wouldn’t miss the exciting beginning of the Senate Banking Committee’s hearing on the auto industry (because automakers are the new banks), and I caught the end of a White House presser. Some reporter was asking Dana Perino if maybe she should stop calling the bank bailout the TARP since it no longer was in fact a …
Judy Biggert, a Republican from Illinois, had a question for Hank Paulson at today’s House Financial Services Committee hearing: What ever happened to that plan to insure troubled mortgages assets that we included in the bailout bill?
This insurance plan was a bad idea, seemingly ginned up on the fly by Eric Cantor so it would at least …
Last week, after considering GM’s arguments for why it can’t go into Chapter 11, I wrote:
GM is headed for bankruptcy without government intervention. So any government intervention ought to be structured like a bankruptcy: Current shareholders wiped out (they’re almost there already), debt converted to equity, top management out. We
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