Money magazine senior writer and Time.com snatch-away Stephen Gandel wrote a smart piece taking apart the Treasury Department’s sort-of-secret plan to bolster the housing market by driving down mortgage rates. Since the whole point of drumming up new buyers is to stabilize home prices, the part of the story I like most is the one that …
The floor is sticky with blood
The newsroom is not a pretty place — and by newsroom, I mean the imaginary one we work in at TIME, which is actually a collection of flourescent-lit offices with about as much Hollywood panache as, well, a collection of flourescent-lit offices. We reporters are not a queasy people — and by reporters I mean the staff writers and …
The Detroit Three move to the House
I’m watching the House Financial Services Committee hearing on the auto bailout, but I’m not going to give it the extensive treatment that I gave to yesterday’s Senate hearing. The House hearings are almost never as good as the Senate ones anyway, and I’ve got other stuff to do. I will write something later about the drama in …
The ugly November jobs report
The November employment report is out, and it’s bad: The unemployment rate is up to 6.7% from 6.5%, which doesn’t sound so horrible at all. But payroll employment is down an estimated 533,000, which is much more than most economists were expecting and is, well, a lot of people.
What it still isn’t is a historic drop: It’s yet another …
Why I’m volunteering for a buyout in this cruddy economy
From the tone and subject of my posts over the past couple of weeks, you may have guessed this was coming. Yep: I’m sacking myself.
What kind of brainless ninny would volunteer for unemployment in an economy so crappy we’ve run out of hyperbolic adjectives? If my mother were alive, she’d ask the same thing. Or, rather, she’d ask, …
The auto hearings, part deux
The CEOs of the Detroit Three have successfully navigated the roads between Michigan and Washington, D.C., in their hybrid vehicles, and arrived at the hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. UAW chief Ron Gettelfinger is there too, but I’m assuming he was sensible enough to fly Northwest. It’s their second try at pleading …
This is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen
That’s Rick Wagoner, chairman of G.M., being driven to Washington D.C. for today’s Congressional testimony. Mapquest tells me Detroit to D.C. is nine hours. Fantastic use of a CEO’s time. Not like he has anything else to be doing. So glad we guilted him into this. Bill Saporito has more to say on the topic. And on the auto industry in …
New column: Should the 401(k) be killed?
My latest column is online and in the issue of TIME with something about Detroit on the cover that won’t be on newsstands until tomorrow. It begins:
Teresa Ghilarducci has always had more interesting — and controversial — things to say than your average retirement-policy wonk. An economist who moved this year from the University of
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The Wall Street amnesty program: Just give back the money
In Thursday’s FT, John Gapper does a very nice job of threading the needle on The Great Bob Rubin Question:
Mr Rubin needs to find a way to make up for his part in Citi’s downfall. My suggestion is that, in addition to giving up his bonus for this year and last, he returns, or gives to a good cause, the bonuses he got in 2005 and 2006,
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There’s always money in parking meters
And Morgan Stanley wants it. The city of Chicago is on the cusp of signing a contract to let a Morgan Stanley-backed consortium collect money from its parking meters for the next 75 years. I’d love to make a quip about how the flailing bank must be really desperate for new sources of funding, but, alas, this is part of a much larger …
Journalist, this is your future
A few reports from the front lines of the battle for journalism’s future (yes, it’s a hardship post, deserving of three weeks’ R&R in Phuket):
Securitization: Dead parrot, or half-dead parrot?
Arnold Kling, riffing on something I wrote the other day about the end of investment banking as we’ve known it, writes:
I think of securitization as like the dead parrot in the famous Monty Python sketch. Trying to rescue it or revive it strikes me as madness. I keep saying that we need to revert to the mortgage finance system of forty
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