And this time I mean it. I just hit the send button a few minutes ago on the final draft of The Myth of the Rational Market. I still owe my editor a few extras, like a cast of characters (there are many) and a recommended reading list, and I’m sure there’s still much tweaking to come. But the major stuff is, finally, done. I mean, I …
After Alan Greenspan’s big admission that his intellectual edifice had crumbled, the journalistic world is on the lookout for other confessions from the prominent deregulators of the 1990s. Well, Phil Gramm isn’t going to comply:
“There is this idea afloat that if you had more regulation you would have fewer mistakes,” he said. “I
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Forgot to post this Friday. My new column is online and in the issue with BHO in FDR garb on the cover. It begins:
If you had quizzed economists on the topic a decade ago, most would have told you that passing legislation to stimulate the economy was pointless. Getting the timing right was too hard. Increasing the deficit could bring
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Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn doesn’t want to see GM go bankrupt. And that’s not because he’s nice. “Nobody likes to see a competitor in a difficult position, because it usually messes up the whole market,” he says. “Any disruption today is going to add more to the problems of the industry.”
Ghosn was here at TIME this afternoon for a …
The American system of retirement saving is in big trouble. Not so much Social Security: That has some long-term funding issues, but they are–actuarily, if not politically–easily fixable. The big problems are with workplace pensions and retirement accounts.
As everybody knows, the corporate pension system that evolved after World War …
I’m not saying you should ignore cars and gas, but I always love playing with the numbers in reports like this.
The headline is that retail sales were down 2.8% in October, the worst one month decline since this particular economic series was launched in 1992. That historical fact is not quite as ominous as it might sound, given that …
The signature moment of today’s long House committee hearing on hedge funds came deep in the Q&A. Massachusetts Democrat John Tierney looked at hedge fund manager John Paulson, who earlier had offered some pointed suggestions on how Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson ought to be using the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, and …
Yesterday was Hank Paulson Day. Today it’s John Paulson’s turn. The hedge fund manager, who took home a $3.7 billion paycheck last year by betting on the mortgage bust, is one of several hedgie bigwigs testifying before Henry Waxman’s Committee and Oversight and Government Reform. They’re only just getting to the Q&A, but I loved this …
My column in the soon-to-be-on-newsstands TIME, which isn’t online yet, is about fiscal stimulus. So is Joe Klein’s column, which is online. It’s stimulus week!
Anyway, one stimulus idea that I didn’t get to, but really like, was one proposed by Alan Blinder last summer, Cash for Clunkers. Wrote Blinder:
Cash for Clunkers is a generic
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I wrote a piece for Time.com about Hank Paulson’s chat with the world this morning. It begins:
It was his first formal public defense and explanation of his actions since the dust settled from the financial panic of late September and early October, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had clearly been thinking about it for a while.
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GE has just announced (pdf) that GE Capital has been approved to participate in the FDIC’s Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. The FDIC will now guarantee all GE Capital debt (subject to some limits) issued between this Friday and June 30, 2009. Banks already have this deal. Now GE Capital does too.
As an interesting side-note, GE …
Here’s what the Treasury Secretary has to say for himself this morning:
The actions taken by Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the FDIC in October have clearly helped stabilize our financial system. Before we acted, we were at a tipping point. Credit markets were largely frozen, denying financial institutions, businesses and consumers
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