It has gotten to be pretty much consensus opinion that:
(1) the Great Recession is about to end, or already has
but
(2) the recovery will be weak and fitful.
That’s what Dan Gross’s cover story in this week’s Newsweek says, at least. I made the same claim in my column a few weeks ago, and one can find lots of bona fide economic …
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The Daily Show‘s John Oliver took a look at Tim Geithner’s hard-to-sell Larchmont, N.Y., house last night. The segment wasn’t all that funny, but the part where Oliver gets Robert Shiller to comment on whether Geithner’s turquoise (aqua? teal?) bathroom tiles are driving …
Between his admission to FBI agents in December that he’d been running a Ponzi scheme and his sentencing for his crimes last month, Bernie Madoff didn’t say much—at least not where any of us could hear him. Now that he’s in prison for several lifetimes, though, he’s turned chatty. Attorneys Joe Cotchett and Nancy Fineman—who …
Alex Tabarrok offers a handy summing-up of what experimental economics has taught us about bubbles:
In the lab we can create artificial assets with known dividend streams and thus known fundamental values. Since Vernon Smith’s classic experiments (JSTOR), we know that even in these cases efficient markets fail and bubbles are common.
…
The first data point comes from a press release from the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center (it’s not online):
According to the just released July 28 Levy Forecast, while many give the private economy credit for resiliency, “Few understand that the government deficit now accounts for all of the economy’s profits.”
The second is in Mark …
My column in the new TIME addresses the Goldman Sachs/JPMorgan profitathon. My argument is that they’re making so much money because they’re better at what they do than their peers are. Which doesn’t necessarily mean we need to keep letting them make so much money.
This will probably be it for blogging from me today. We’re off to pick …
An editor (I assume he’d prefer to remain nameless) poked his head into my office a little while ago to inform to me that the Dow Jones Industrials average had passed 9,000 today. So I did what every modern journalist does would do in such a situation and Googled “9,000 dow.” That led me to a blog post by Paul Krugman, headlined “Dow …
John Gapper on where things stand in reforming the global financial system:
This leaves us precisely where we started, with France and Germany tilting misguidedly at hedge funds while the UK and the US fear to clamp down on large banks in case they move from New York to London (or vice-versa) or locate themselves offshore.
It does seem …
I was on the Diane Rehm Show last week, talking about my book, and Jacob from Ypsilanti, Michigan called in to say:
I wanted to ask your guest why we so often … demonize the free market without discussing the Federal Reserve’s policy of regulating the value of currency through interest rates and how that subverts that same market.
Ah, …
I watched Ron Paul’s questioning of Ben Bernanke yesterday, and it got me thinking. “The Federal Reserve, in collaboration with giant banks, has created the greatest financial crisis ever seen,” Paul said. This particular crisis certainly has the Fed’s fingerprints all over it. But if we dismantled the Fed, as Paul advocates, would the …
Caterpillar’s second-quarter earnings report, which has Wall Street abuzz this morning, is a fascinating document. It’s fascinating in part because Caterpillar, a large Midwestern manufacturer whose factory workers are represented by the United Auto Workers, turned a profit for the quarter ($371 million, down from $1.1 billion in the …
Stanford profs Kenneth Scott and John Taylor had an op-ed in yesterday’s WSJ arguing for “mandated transparency” in mortgage securitization. This brought to mind a conversation I had last week with Andrew Dubinsky, who runs a lending software company called Encomia and would love it if somebody mandated more disclosure in mortgage …
