I had CSPAN on so I wouldn’t miss the exciting beginning of the Senate Banking Committee’s hearing on the auto industry (because automakers are the new banks), and I caught the end of a White House presser. Some reporter was asking Dana Perino if maybe she should stop calling the bank bailout the TARP since it no longer was in fact a …
Maybe Hank Paulson should give silence a try
Judy Biggert, a Republican from Illinois, had a question for Hank Paulson at today’s House Financial Services Committee hearing: What ever happened to that plan to insure troubled mortgages assets that we included in the bailout bill?
This insurance plan was a bad idea, seemingly ginned up on the fly by Eric Cantor so it would at least …
Sign of the times
The cookie place near our office is promoting its products for the two big office-party events on the horizon: Christmas and more layoffs:
Barbara!
The bankruptcy-by-some-other-name solution at GM
Last week, after considering GM’s arguments for why it can’t go into Chapter 11, I wrote:
GM is headed for bankruptcy without government intervention. So any government intervention ought to be structured like a bankruptcy: Current shareholders wiped out (they’re almost there already), debt converted to equity, top management out. We
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Turned it in
And this time I mean it. I just hit the send button a few minutes ago on the final draft of The Myth of the Rational Market. I still owe my editor a few extras, like a cast of characters (there are many) and a recommended reading list, and I’m sure there’s still much tweaking to come. But the major stuff is, finally, done. I mean, I …
The race to the bottom of the bonus pool
For years we were told that Wall Street had to pay its top executives sky-high bonuses in order to retain the best talent. I guess when your industry is imploding, folks are willing to stick around for a little less money.
Goldman Sachs is getting a lot of cred for announcing on Sunday that its seven top officers won’t get bonuses this …
Phil Gramm’s mea non culpa
After Alan Greenspan’s big admission that his intellectual edifice had crumbled, the journalistic world is on the lookout for other confessions from the prominent deregulators of the 1990s. Well, Phil Gramm isn’t going to comply:
“There is this idea afloat that if you had more regulation you would have fewer mistakes,” he said. “I
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New column: Stimulating times
Forgot to post this Friday. My new column is online and in the issue with BHO in FDR garb on the cover. It begins:
If you had quizzed economists on the topic a decade ago, most would have told you that passing legislation to stimulate the economy was pointless. Getting the timing right was too hard. Increasing the deficit could bring
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A quantum of solace in this economy: Plan B
…by which I don’t mean the morning-after pill. I was talking to my friend Penelope Trunk, CEO of Brazen Careerist and the bluntest career expert I know, and it seemed evident to me after our conversation that in this economy, we all need a Plan B. That’s right: an actionable, practical strategy to fire up if and when Plan A goes …
OK, so Carlos Ghosn cares about saving GM. Should we?
It’s an excellent question, one that Bill Saporito takes on in the current issue of our magazine. You can read his story, “Is General Motors Worth Saving?” online here. You can also watch Bill talk about his story on MSNBC tomorrow morning at 10:30.
My question, considering the way things have been shaking out in the mortgage market, is …
Carlos Ghosn sure hopes GM doesn’t go bankrupt
Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn doesn’t want to see GM go bankrupt. And that’s not because he’s nice. “Nobody likes to see a competitor in a difficult position, because it usually messes up the whole market,” he says. “Any disruption today is going to add more to the problems of the industry.”
Ghosn was here at TIME this afternoon for a …
Battle of the loan modifiers
Sheila Bair, head of the FDIC, was on NPR this morning talking about her new plan to stem foreclosures. She wants to entice servicers to modify more mortgages by having the government shoulder up to half of the losses from any rewritten loans that go back into default. Sound good? Not to the White House or Treasury Department.
Bair, a …