Yesterday the Treasury Department released the specifics about how mortgage servicers are to be coaxed into rewriting loan terms to keep struggling borrowers in their homes. This, as you may recall, is one part of the government new three-pronged housing crisis fix. (The other two are letting some underwater borrowers refinance and using …
Who gets hit hardest by the global downturn
I did an interview yesterday with Lisa Mullins at Public Radio International’s The World on which countries are suffering most from the meltdown. It was on short notice, so I was sort of making stuff up as I went, but the producer (an old friend) seems to have edited out my most obviously clueless statements. So, for dadfox and any other …
Has GE’s long history of accounting cleverness finally caught up with it?
Way back in 1997, I wrote these words in a Fortune article:
General Electric, a company whose name invariably comes up when you ask Wall Streeters about earnings management, says it does what it does because the stock market demands it. “We think consistency of earnings and no surprises is very important for us,” says Dennis Dammerman,
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Fixing American finance with TALF
The details are out on the government’s trillion-dollar program to spark lending by financing the sale of securitizations. Originally, we were just going to do securities backed by loans to consumers and small businesses, but now we’re also looking to give a boost to loans for heavy industrial equipment, rental-car fleets and …
Clearly you don’t have to be smart to earn $250K+
In the comments to a post I wrote last week on the tax hikes in the Obama budget, someone named frontier2 got a lot of you (and me) riled up with his/her comments that he/she was “already trying to figure out how I can work less in order to make just under $250k.” Well, it turns out that this has become a popular meme among people who …
Does Tim Geithner have a plan?
Noam Scheiber has an interesting if (perhaps inevitably) inconclusive article in The New Republic on “What’s stopping Tim Geithner?” It begins:
In June 2007, Tim Geithner, then the president of the New York Fed, gave a speech about the financial crisis he’d helped defuse as a Clinton Treasury official in the late 1990s. … Geithner
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Outside the U.S. and China, there’s not all that much stimulating going on
The International Labor Organization has put together a useful compendium of economic stimulus efforts around the world (click here to download the Word file). I know this not because they announced it or anything but because a former student of Harvard economist Dani Rodrik works at the ILO and wrote in to Rodrik point out some flaws in …
Why the AIG bailout just keeps getting bigger
Proponents of the nationalization of troubled big banking companies like Citigroup generally make the case that the work should be done with dispatch and the banks returned promptly to private hands. But the test case for nationalization, AIG, is demonstrating that it may not be that easy.
When the Federal Reserve effectively took over …
Snow day
As you can see, we didn’t get a huge amount of snow in Manhattan overnight. But schools chancellor Joel Klein has decided in his wisdom that “today’s a day for a snow day,” and New York City public schools are closed because of snow for the first time since Curious Capitalist Jr. began attending five years ago. Guess I’m working …
New column: The already-nationalized banks
I’ve got a new column online and in the issue of TIME with a fraying rope on the cover. It’s not entirely new—bits of it already appeared in a TIME.com piece I wrote Tuesday—and what I really want to talk about are the other economy-related pieces in the magazine: There’s David von Drehle’s wrenching House of Cards: The Faces Behind …
Fan mail to Aaron Task, Henry Blodget, John Mauldin, the Planet Money gang and Felix Salmon
I’m not an unalloyed fan of Henry Blodget as a business journalist. He’s a smart guy and a good writer, but he has a tendency to go for bold statements that represent not so much the sum total of his thinking as the sum total of his desire to make an impression (this was true when he was an analyst, too, of course). I have become a huge …
Wow, those are some bad GDP numbers
I just wrote a quick piece for TIME.com on this morning’s GDP release. The conclusion, for those who’d prefer to skip all the numbers and stuff:
Unless it ends suddenly tomorrow, all signs are that this will stack up as the worst economic downturn in the U.S. since the Great Depression. But if government spending is able to begin
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