Fed chairman Ben Bernanke gave his first speech in a month today (although I guess he did do some testifying a couple weeks ago). In typically laid-back Bernankian fashion he described all the crazy stuff that’s been happening, described the response by the Fed, Treasury and FDIC, and said that he believed these “bold actions … …
Governments around the world have been acting to avert panics by retail bank customers, and they’ve mostly succeeded. That’s a good thing, but it’s also sort of beside the point. “Main Street depositors are keeping confidence,” FDIC chairman Sheila Bair said when I talked to her last week. “It’s other banks that are the problem.”
The …
The next bold experiment (or desperate gambit, if you prefer) from the Fed appears to be a plan to start buying commercial paper directly from the companies that issue it. The reason is that the commercial paper market, a key source of short-term funding for big companies, is shrinking rapidly.
The Fed mentioned as sort of an aside to a …
The Dow ended the day down 370 points, after being down more than 800 in midafternoon. How can this be explained?
1. Pure random chance. As Nassim Taleb writes in Fooled by Randomness:
To be competent, a journalist should view matters like a historian, and play down the value of the information he is providing, such as by saying, “Today
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Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, former Fed Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson and former Bank of Israel Governor (and AIG vice chairman!) Jacob Frenkel had a little press conference this morning to discuss the structure of financial regulation or–more precisely, a report called The Structure of Financial Regulation (pdf; and it’s just the …
For the last few weeks the U.S. stock market has been a haven of relative calm in global financial markets. Seriously. I know it doesn’t look calm, what with drops (and occasional increases) of 5+% becoming the order of the day. But instead of freezing up like credit markets, the stock market been functioning smoothly as investors assess …
My attempt to answer a reader’s long list of questions about the bailout has been condensed into an article in the new TIME (with the soup line on the cover). Barbara also has a piece in the magazine about current consumer credit conditions, which is also condensed from something that ran first online. Meanwhile, the magazine also …
So this time it passed, and it wasn’t even all that close (263-171). After turning down a $700 billion financial bailout plan on Monday, the House turned around and this afternoon approved an even more expensive one–loaded with tax cuts, an expansion of federal deposit insurance, and a now infamous tax exemption for certain toy wooden …
The House is expecting to vote on the big bailout (oh, sorry, rescue) bill around 12:30. Jay Newton-Small has a story up on TIME.com explaining that the fiscal-conservative Blue Dog Democrats in the House, who mostly supported the bill on its first go round but are ticked off at all the junk the Senate added to it, may be crucial to its …
Can we stop saying now that financial troubles “might” tip us into a recession? As this morning’s employment numbers (and a lot of other data in recent days) make clear, we’re in a recession. I’m still betting that the arbiters of such things will eventually decide we’ve been in a weird, mild recessiony kind of thing since last fall. Now …
In a fascinating turn of events that we’ll surely all learn more about over the course of the next few days, Wells Fargo–which had been about to buy Wachovia a week ago and then backed down, forcing the FDIC to bankroll a shotgun acquisition by Citigroup–changed its mind and agreed to pay $15 billion for the giant bank.
This time the …
There was a reader Q&A this Wednesday morning on the Washington Post site with business columnist Steven Pearlstein, who won a Pulitzer for his 2007 coverage of the financial crisis and has continued to write great stuff (via Romenesko). I link to it mainly because I’m getting asked more questions these days than I can ever answer, so …
