The Congressional Budget Office has just issued its estimate of the likely cost of Hank Paulson’s plan to let troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac draw on a Treasury credit line (that is, borrow money from taxpayers). The verdict: $25 billion.
This is what the CBO calls “probability-weighted average” of the different …
I’m the commentator tonight on the Nightly Business Report on PBS, which airs at 6:30 p.m. here in New York and whenever PBS says its on in your hometown. I talk about Fannie and Freddie and Bear and bailouts and such. For some reason I feel awkward posting the script now, before the segment has aired. So I’ll add it later.
Here it
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Richard Bitner, author of the new book Confessions of a Subprime Lender (known in its previous, self-published incarnation as Greed, Fraud & Ignorance), is going to be on the Daily Show tonight. He was here Friday, and was pretty entertaining and enlightening. I failed to videotape him, though. So watch him tonight, and in the meantime, …
Stephen Colbert still deserves credit for “truthiness.” But it turns out its relative “factiness,” which Colbert purported to coin early last year, was already in use in the 1870s. This is from a letter written by naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir after his first meeting with the great botanist Asa Gray in 1872:
He is a most
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She’s not real clear on the details. But it definitely wasn’t her brother’s fault (via Gawker).
Jonathan Chait has written an epic and perfectly Chaitian takedown of Naomi Klein for The New Republic (nothing else he writes will ever be as perfectly Chaitian as his takedown of Delaware, Rogue State; but this comes close).
I’d advise reading the whole thing just for the sheer pleasure of watching a master polemicist at work, but …
My new column is in the issue of TIME with Afghanistan on the cover and online here. It begins:
It’s getting to be a familiar ritual. Markets panic. A bunch of G-men in dark suits interrupt their routines for an emergency meeting or a conference call to piece together a rescue plan. They announce the plan. Panic subsides. Then, a week to
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Or maybe I should spell it Fanniefrädderung, which has the benefit of being more explicitly Wagnerian if harder for non German-speakers to pronounce. It’s now the Curious Capitalist’s official name for the predicament facing mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Just thought of it myself (and did a quick Google search to make sure …
Yeah, yeah, inflation’s the highest it’s been in 17 years. But Business Week‘s Michael Mandel–who is a real live Ph.D economist!–has been writing a series of blog posts making the case that it’s going to peak soon if it hasn’t already. And that next year we may actually be talking about falling prices. A sampling:
As the economy slows,
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It’s Raines-bashing day here at the Curious Capitalist! First Frank, now my old friend Howell (full disclosure: the man bought me lunch once, and has always been very nice to me). In his newish incarnation as media critic for Conde Nast Portfolio, Howell has written a column arguing that the “children of Reaganomics” now populating …
The SEC, which has been watching this financial crisis mostly from the sidelines so far, is suddenly on the warpath. First it announced emergency rules meant to make it harder to short-sell certain financial stocks, among them Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now it’s reportedly flinging subpoenas around the offices of Goldman Sachs, Deutsche …
Franklin Delano Raines, who ran Fannie Mae before being forced to resign amid an accounting scandal in 2004, and still owns stock in the company, has a very strange op-ed today in the Washington Post.
Raines starts out by arguing that the loan losses so far at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are actually pretty manageable. He may be right …
