In the NYT this morning, David Leonhardt writes that the Federal Reserve should do more to push against inflating investment bubbles:
The Fed could have tightened financial rules, like the amount of cash that must be put up for a given investment. It also could have used the bully pulpit. Imagine what might have happened in 2005 if Mr.
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Businessweek.com has a lovely slide show (link from Harold Maass) of mortgage industry executives who used to be really rich and now aren’t so much.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg has an article (via Trader Daily) on how the credit crunch “may cut Wall Street bonuses for the first time in five years.”
Hooray for that, I say. I’m not at all …
The big news in Holland Tuesday is that a TV report claiming that soccer star Mark van Bommel is planning to become a German citizen was a hoax that Van Bommel helped manufacture. This is very funny stuff in Holland, I think. (You want to become a … German?!? Ha ha ha ha ha.)
Anyway, I didn’t find it all that funny, but a roundup of …
In an e-mail that came in while I was on vacation, reader Mike Mitchell wrote:
Just curious about something I see you and others mention frequently, especially in light of Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal. The phrase typically invoked is “right-wing editorial page”. I read the WSJ every day – read the
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Every once in a while (more often than really is appropriate, but not what you could call frequently), I look up from what I’m reading in the subway to discover that I’ve missed my stop. Sometimes I’ve even missed two stops.
Anyway, as I rolled into Times Square on the downtown 1 train Monday morning (I was supposed to get off at 50th …
Warren Buffett is quoted in this morning’s W$J saying that “I can spend money faster than Imelda Marcos when things are right.” The implication of the Heard on the Street column in which he appears is that after several overpriced years, things are getting to be “right,” athough Buffett himself never says this.
All in all it’s a weaker …
Curious Capitalist reader YMM alerts me to an interesting Lester Thurow column in the Sunday NYT and wonders what I think. I’m generally very dubious of Professor Thurow, given as how he spent the early 1990s arguing that the U.S. economy was doomed, only to jump on the U.S.-is-best bandwagon later in the decade.
But his point in the …
Sunday was my last day for a while of reading the San Francisco Chronicle on paper over breakfast (of course, if Jon Fine gets his way, it will be my last day ever of reading the Chron on paper). The lead editorial in particular caught my eye. Headlined “a war on state’s economy,” it begins:
Not satisfied with its full-scale attack on
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From this morning’s W$J, an account of what New York Fed President Tim Geithner did last week:
Particularly at times of stress, what the Fed says can be almost as powerful a weapon as what the Fed does. So Mr. Geithner, whose job makes him the traditional liaison to Wall Street, turned to a convenient forum, the Clearing House Payments
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After all that Southern California overkill, here are my photos of the Northern California sights. On Monday I’ll get back to freaking out about the mortgage market.
The kitchen at Chez Panisse:
The Exploratorium:
The Coliseum (final score A’s 8, White Sox 5):
That’s Blackie’s Beach, in Newport Beach. And this is some panda in San Diego:
This is where you get your chili dogs in Chatsworth, in the northwestern corner of the San Fernando Valley:
