The Loan Dissenter: Kansas City Fed President Tom Hoenig (Nati Harnik/AP)
Last month, economist Thomas Hoenig delivered a speech at a public meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska, called Hard Choices. The normally mild-mannered Hoenig said the Fed’s recent policy of holding interest rates near zero was a “dangerous gamble.” He said he feared …
Recession Deals, Going, Going, Gone (Source: AP)
Good news for everyone who has been out of work for months, facing foreclosure or generally struggling to make their bills: The recession is over. The bad news: It has been for a while. The National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the organization that officially designates when a …
Beware of the Elephants (Source: Birinyi Associates)
Markets, in general, like elections. And there is a long standing belief on Wall Street that Republicans are good for stocks. So the rising possibility that Republicans could win back majorities in the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate this November has whipped a …
A family in Detroit eats at a food kitchen (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The US Census Bureau is out with its annual report on poverty and incomes today and the results are striking: The number of people living in poverty in the US is at an all time high. The last time this many people were living in poverty in the US was in the late …
Economists question how much mileage we got from Cash for Clunkers (Bob Travaglione/www.FoToEdge.com)
Cash for clunkers may have been a total wreck. Ever since the program, which offered consumers cash for a new car when they traded in an old, low-gas-mileage vehicle, rolled off Washington’s policy lot last year there has been debate as …
Austan Goolsbee and President Obama (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
It has become taboo to defend anything having to do with subprime lending. Why would you? It’s clear now that banks and mortgage brokers handed out expensive loans to many people who had little ability to make the payments. It’s also clear that the result was not …
Cell phone tower builders could get a stimulus benefit
If you think a plan called, “Cash for Cell Phone Towers,” or “Cash for Internal Combustion Engines,” sounds kind of clunky, that may be the problem.
On Wednesday, President Obama in a speech in Cleveland, Ohio, officially announces a bonanza of a business tax cut that could …
More people are lining up for jobs via Reuters
The Department of Labor reported August job numbers on Friday, and the numbers appeared to be another bad sign for the recovery. The economy lost 54,000 positions in the last full month of summer. Worse, the unemployment rate rose for the first time in four months to 9.6%, from a rate of …
Fuld on the Offensive via Getty Images
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on Wednesday took on the question of what led to Lehman’s failure and I’m not sure we came away with any answers. Although we did get a much better window into the lingering bad blood between Fuld and the Federal Reserve.
The FCIC is looking into the …
Attack of the Clones
To the best of my knowledge, no where among the nearly 2,300 pages that is the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the hundreds of proposed new regulations is there anything restricting human cloning. And that, it turns out, might be a bad thing.
Recently, a nearly decade old paper on the …
One of the big reasons people argue against raising taxes for the richest Americans is that higher taxes make people less inclined to work. The result is that raising taxes at some point doesn’t raise any more tax income for the government. This is in effect the famous Laffer Curve.
I’m not sure I believe that. I think people, …
Bernanke made a speech this morning to other central bankers, economists and journalists at an annual forum in Jackson Hole. There were a number of key phrases Fed watchers were expecting to hear and, hopefully, not hear. And here’s the tally. Bernanke used some variation of the work “slow” seven times. So, as expected, Bernanke was …
