Jim Surowiecki, riffing on my post from last week on possible reasons for Treasury’s less-than-bold approach to the banking crisis, which was itself a riff on a Ryan Avent riff on a Gary Weiss profile of Tim Geithner (yes, we bloggers are news-gathering dynamoes), writes:
It’s true that the administration’s approach may not be bold in
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Scott Minerd, a former big-cheese investment banker at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse who now runs Guggenheim Partners Asset Management, isn’t a big fan of today’s investment banks. He made this clear a couple times this morning at a Milken Instutute Global Conference discussion on Private Versus Publicly Held Financial Institutions: …
I’m sitting in a one-tenth full meeting room at the Beverly Hilton for a 6:30 a.m. panel discussion on Private Versus Publicly Held Financial Institutions: Which Are Best Positioned? More than 300 people had signed up, but maybe the just added session on the swine flu siphoned people away. Or maybe the swine flu siphoned people …
Remember how during our last Wall Street dust-up (way back in 2001/2002) we made 12 investment banks pay nearly half-a-billion dollars to fund independent stock research? They were then to pass along this research to their brokers and individual customers to go with their own (ostensibly deeply conflicted) opinions of companies.
That …
For some reason the Countrywide brand doesn’t have quite the place in America’s heart that it used to. Since Bank of America bought the beleaguered mortgage giant in January 2008, consumer surveys have shown public opinion go from good to bad to worse. So today B of A jettisons the Countrywide brand. We are all Bank of America Home Loans …
Well, that’s not exactly how he put it. But at discussion this morning at the Milken Institute Global Conference, hedge fund titan Griffin did say this:
Gains were shared by millions of Americans through home equity extraction and sale of homes. … It dwarfed the gains reaped by Wall Street. …
We have allowed what was a society-wide
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I’m sitting in a gigantic ballroom at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, waiting for a Milken Institute Global Conference panel on when the financial recovery is coming. But I’ve already breezed through Jo Becker and Gretchen Morgenson’s epic examination of Tim Geithner’s lunch dates while he was president of the New York Fed.
In …
UC Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez just won the John Bates Clark Medal, which has been given by the American Economic Association every two years to the top American economist under 40. From now it will be given out every year, which will of course totally ruin it.
Anyway, Saez is mainly known outside economics for his work with Thomas Piketty …
The Federal Reserve today released the details of how the stress tests that regulators conducted at the country’s 19 biggest banking companies were put together. The first big revelation: They’re not called stress tests. They’re called the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program, or SCAP.
Regulators were also out and about today telling …
AbTech’s founder couldn’t sell his pollution solution to Big Oil. Turns out that big cities need it more
I’ve been meaning to welcome Ryan Avent to his new gig at Portfolio.com (where he has replaced Felix Salmon). His musings over the past couple of days about why the Obama Administration is handling the banking crisis in such a tentative, unimpressive way provide a good opportunity. Here’s one:
There is a popular idea that if only a
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Two of my favorite somewhat-off-the-beaten-track economic forecasters just came out with strikingly optimistic pronouncements this morning. How optimistic? The recession-should-end-in-a-couple-of-months optimistic.
First was Lakshman Achuthan, whose Economic Cycle Research Institute was founded by the patron saint of Leading Economic …
