Richard Katz, who knows a whole lot more about Japan than I do, writes in the new Foreign Affairs that likening our government’s handling of the financial crisis so far to Japan in the 1990s is balderdash:
It took the Bank of Japan nearly nine years to bring the overnight interest rate from its 1991 peak of eight percent down to zero.
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The very first tax hike (or proposed tax hike) of the Obama era can be found on page 29 of Jumpstarting the Economy and Investing for the Future (pdf!) the main document of the fiscal 2010 budget “outline” released by the White House Office of Management and Budget this morning. Here it is, verbatim:
The Administration’s Budget
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The number of people claiming unemployment benefits for the first time jumped again last week, to 667,000, with the number of people receiving unemployment for more than one week hitting 5.1 million—the highest percentage of the workforce doing so since July 1983. If you’re tired of hearing those figures go up week after week, you …
President Obama’s brief speech about the future of financial regulation this afternoon was pretty vague. But we’re been starting to see a clear pattern from this administration: Vague opening statement, such Tim Geithner’s much-criticized (not by me!) non-unveiling of his Financial Stability Plan two weeks, followed in pretty quick …
Check out this interactive graphic on USAToday.com. As Justin mentioned, I’ve been traveling, which means this morning I read USA Today cover-to-cover. (Thank you, Fairfield Inn!) That’s where I came across this piece, by Brad Heath, which tells us that even in 2007 nearly a tenth of all borrowers were taking on mortgages worth more than …
Joel Stein joins the Rick Santelli bandwagon in a column that I think will be in the next issue of TIME but is already online. It’s far more reasoned and charming than the now famous Santelli rant, although I still disagree with the conclusion.
The biggest revelation is that Joel appears to have paid $1.12 million for his house in the …
I’ve got an article on bank nationalization and the like up on TIME.com. My column for the magazine is going to be an outgrowth of it, so any editorial suggestions will be accepted gratefully (if not necessarily followed).
Apologies for the light posting. Yesterday my only (lame) excuse was a post-vacation funk, but this morning I’ve been writing a TIME.com piece (that I will link to once it’s online) on bank nationalization, at some point this afternoon I’ve got to write my column for this week’s magazine, and between 1 and 2:30 I will be over at CNN for …
The WSJ is reporting that Treasury is thinking about converting the preferred shares in Citi that cost it $45 billion (and that’s not counting government guarantees of a $301 billion Citi loan pool) into a 25% to 40% share of the company’s common stock. This even though all the common shares of Citi could (in theory, at least) have been …
Justin has a column in the new issue of the magazine (the one with Kate Winslet on the cover) about how rising incomes on Wall Street drove the surge in income inequality. One of the finance professors Justin spoke with makes the argument that Wall Street’s pay bump was largely driven by market forces. That as “the sums of money managed …
Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg has found some good news in January’s worse-than-expected 17% drop in housing starts. In a report, he argues that builders have finally pulled the growth rate of new housing supply below the growth rate of new demand—which means we’re entering “a new and final chapter of this unprecedented …
Colleague Steve Gandel wrote a great story. So I asked if he’d be up for blogging about how it came to be. He agreed. Steve writes:
I have a story up on the website today and in the magazine next week about how the government could go about stress testing the banks and what they would find if they did. I got interested in doing the …
