I’ve been reading the speech Barack Obama made on the economy this afternoon, plus his new Rescue Plan for the Middle Class. The speech ends with an eloquent farewell to the age of easy money:
We’ve lived through an era of easy money, in which we were allowed and even encouraged to spend without limits; to borrow instead of save.
Now,
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When last I checked, the Dow was up 6.9% and the S&P 7.5% in reaction to Paul Krugman getting the economics Nobel before trading began this morning. In London the FTSE ended the trading day up 8.26% and in Frankfurt the DAX was up 11.4%.
What? You say there are other possible reasons for global markets’ surge? Something about a …
I have an article in the new Fortune magazine, which has a cracked GE lightbulb on the cover. It begins:
On Nov. 21, 2002, just two months after leaving Princeton University’s economics department for a spot on the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke gave a speech in Washington on the topic of deflation. At the time, stock prices had
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Almost a decade ago, I was working on an article for Fortune about the then-current state of economics. The narrative I settled on was one in which in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cambridge, Mass., had been the birthplace of a new economic mainstream:
This was the context in which the young scholars of Harvard and MIT learned
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We’re going to get the exact dollar totals Monday, but the Eurozone plan to backstop banks appears to be substantial. The German share alone is going to be 400 billion euros ($542 billion), it was reported Sunday.
The UK is also about to pour 39 billion pounds ($66 billion) into RBS, HBOS and Lloyds TSB. And we’re still waiting to hear …
Officials have reviewed the nuclear option of providing an Irish-style sovereign guarantee for all US bank deposits and many or all categories of bank debt as a means of restoring banks’ access to private funds.
But they fear that providing formal guarantees only for banks would trigger the implosion of financial firms
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The G-7 finance ministers say they’re going to “take decisive action and use all available tools to support systemically important financial institutions and prevent their failure.” Hank Paulson says that:
As we develop plans to purchase equity … we are working to develop a standardized program that is open to a broad array of
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Peter Fisher used to run the open market desk at the New York Fed. Then he was Under Secretary of the Treasury during the Paul O’Neill years. Now he’s co-head of fixed income at BlackRock, the firm that’s managing those $29 billion in Bear Stearns assets the Fed took on back in March. So you could say he’s kinda plugged in. Here’s what …
John McCain is suggesting on the campaign trail today that the IRS rules that require owners of retirement accounts (IRA, 401ks, etc.) to withdraw a certain amount (there’s a formula) from those accounts every year after they turn 70 1/2 ought to be suspended because of the market crash.
Sayeth the Senator from Arizona:
To spare
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Barry Ritholtz, one of those guys who’s been right a lot over the past couple years about the market, is sniffing a market bottom. He’s just put up a post listing 10 “charts, signals, indicators” that, as he puts it, “suggest to us that we are increasingly close to a bottom that can be purchased for an upside trade of 20-30% from these …
Heidi Moore of the WSJ has a fascinating account of a panel discussion this morning featuring Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone and Glenn Hutchins of Silver Lake. I know a lot of people have soured on anything anybody on Wall Street says, but this …
Fixing Global Finance, the new book from The Dean himself, FT economics columnist Martin Wolf, just arrived in the mail. Sadly, it doesn’t appears to be about fixing the mess we’re in today. It’s about fixing the huge current account imbalances (we run ginormous deficits, China and Japan run big surpluses) that Wolf says brought on the …
