“Learning” is probably too strong a word. “Looking at and failing to comprehend” is more like it. There are posters like this all over the conference wing of the Santa Clara Marriott, put up by Ph.D students with fellowships from the Hertz Foundation to explain what they’re up to. Bill Gates is supposed to come by a little later and …
New column: The Upside of Anger
Here’s my new column. And, just to give you the readers of the Curious Capitalist some added value, I have reproduced the column I originally wrote, then tore up because I didn’t like it, after the break. I’m currently sitting in a semi-comfy chair at the Santa Clara Marriott, which is right across the street from a roller coaster. In a …
A refreshing breath of (silly and disingenous) fresh air from Capitol Hill
I’m currently a couple doors down from the house where I grew up in Lafayette, Calif., mooching off the neighbors’ wifi (thanks, Roger and Jeane!). And I’m trying to figure out what I think about the House of Representatives voting 328 to 93 today to impose that 90% tax on bonuses paid out by companies getting government bailouts.
My …
The view from my breakfast table
At the new JetBlue terminal at JFK. I’m about to get on a plane to Oakland. More news later.
Time to get Tim Geithner a Bloomberg terminal. Oh, wait, he already has one
My TIME colleague Massimo Calabresi reports that:
Though Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Congressional leaders Tuesday he only learned of the impending $160 million bonus payments to members of AIG’s troubled financial products unit March 10, sources tell TIME that the New York Federal Reserve informed Treasury staff that
…
Helicopter Ben finally hauls out the helicopter
The Federal Open Market Committee, that group whose interest rate decisions we used to care about back before the Federal funds rate settled down around 0.15%, moved markets this afternoon with its announcement that it was going to buy lots more mortgage securities (up to $750 billion more) and start buying long-term Treasuries (up to …
Steve Randy Waldman saves my morning
I had the curious experience this morning of finishing a column and being deeply dissatisfied with it, then reading a Steve Randy Waldman post that inspired me to go back and fix it. And now I’m reasonably happy with the column. I can’t show it to you yet (and it’s always possible my editors will hate it), but I can link to Waldman’s …
A few notes on the jump in housing starts
This morning the Department of Commerce reported (PDF) that housing starts jumped 22% in February to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 583,000. January’s figure, 477,000, had been a record low. Some commentators are taking the uptick as a sign that the housing market may be bottoming, though other MSM regulars—a couple of whom are …
Did we save the wrong messed-up financial firm? (AIG as opposed to Lehman)
BusinessWeek‘s Michael Mandel asks the big question: Should We Have Saved Lehman and Let AIG Fail?
These folks at AIG are turning out to be annoying and amateurs to boot, in the deepest sense. It looks like they were just playing out of their league, and they signed bad contracts. I would rather have bet on Lehman.
I heard the same thing …
Why did employment fall so fast in the 1930s?
Felix Salmon e-mails saying he wants to hear my explanation for why payroll employment dropped so much more precipitously in the early 1930s than it has in this recession. Here are a couple of thoughts:
The initial sharp decline in the last few months of 1929 and first few months of 1930 was simply a reflection of how the labor market …
Should we do mortgages like the Danes do?
This blog has been falling down lately on its pledge to be America’s Leading Source of News About the Danish Economy™. I failed to link to Bryan Walsh’s excellent TIME article on Danish energy policy. I failed to bring to your attention an Economist story that ranks Denmark as one of the world’s top countries for entrepreneurs. I …
On the job front, this is no Great Depression. Not even close
Writing (and charting) about the latest employment numbers a couple of weeks ago, I concluded that:
It’s probably still nowhere near as dramatic a chart as the monthly numbers from 1931 and 1932 would make. But the BLS wasn’t on the case back then.
That brought an e-mail from Dartmouth economist Doug Irwin, who told me that the Bureau of …