Sorry I missed this, but my friend Brian O’Keefe from Fortune checked in with Richard Rainwater (like I kept saying I would) last week, and it turns out Rainwater got back into oil stocks a little while back:

Back in May, when oil was at $129 per barrel and rising, billionaire investor Richard Rainwater did something as prescient as it

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The Dow was down another 679 points today. Twelve more days like that and it hits zero. The point being that there aren’t going to be 12 more days like that, at least not in a row.

At this point I’m getting really sick of trying offer explanations for why the market did what it did. It would seem to be a combination of deep uncertainty …

And a lot of other things, too—like a healthcare research facility at the University of Louisville, science labs at Western Kentucky University, and water and sewer lines in rural communities—because it was able to sell $400 million worth of municipal bonds on Tuesday.

This is great news, considering that the muni market had pretty …

A couple days ago I wrote a post ribbing Nobel laureate Robert Lucas for his statement at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Economic Association that:

Macroeconomics was born as a distinct field in the 1940s, as a part of the intellectual response to the Great Depression. The term then referred to the body of knowledge and

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Former Curious Capitalist guest blogger Mark Gimein has been writing up a storm lately at The Big Money, Slate’s new business site. I really like his latest piece, about why it’s so hard to make money betting against bubbles. A sample:

Bubbles actually punish rational expectations. Andrew Lo, an economist at MIT… explains it like this:

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Did anybody else notice that when Hank Paulson was describing in his press conference today what the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act enables Treasury to do, the first thing he listed was “to inject capital into financial institutions”?

That wasn’t how Treasury initially advertised its Troubled Asset Relief Program. It was sold as a …

A few weeks ago Steve Randy Waldman had a nice post titled Real Capitalists Nationalize. His argument:

The superficially private-sector-friendly Paulson Plan is likely to entail socializing losses and undermining the incentives that give capitalism its efficacy and its legitimacy. Outright nationalization, on the other hand, may look

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John McCain’s announcement during the debate Tuesday night that he wants the government to spend $300 billion buying up mortgages and rewriting the terms was something of a landmark in the national discussion over what to do about our financial mess.

Yeah, it was a half-baked proposal that made no acknowledgement of the fact that Barney …

Since we’ll probably all be joining the ranks of the unemployed in the coming months, it’s nice to know that that there are ironic pleasures to be had at the employment office. From a friend of a friend (yes, it’s an actual person; the educational-video connoisseurs among you may even be able to figure out who it is):

So I had to go to

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Over the past couple of weeks there’s been chatter about companies possibly not being able to pay workers because of the credit crunch. The idea is that without ready access to the commercial paper market—which big companies use to issue short-term IOUs—there won’t be enough money to finance things like inventory and payroll.

The …

I should really turn off CNBC, as it’s shaking my brain into Jello, but Zachary Karabell just said something I liked:

Unless you believe the market’s going to hit zero in 25 days, we’re not going to have days like this every day.

But what if you believe the market’s going to hit -10,000 in 50 days?

Update: The Dow ended up dropping …