Aha. When the proposal to bulk up bank capital by converting the government's preferred shares into common equity came out, I pronounced myself baffled. But was I missing something? Via Henry Blodget, Paul Kasriel of Northern Trust says the same thing, in more detail. PS: Kasriel should be careful about hypothetical examples involving Gotham City Bank. [...:]
Currently on a train. "All doors will not open at this station," says the conductor. OK, I know he means "not all doors will open." But it does bother me.
Joe Nocera writes about Thursday's New York Revie/PEN event on the economy, but fails to mention what I found the most depressing aspect of the whole thing: further confirmation that we're living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics, in which hard-won knowledge has simply been forgotten. What's the evidence? Niall Ferguson "explaining" that fiscal expansion will [...:]
Clearly, opposition to doing something about climate change has fallen back to a new position: claims that attempting to limit greenhouse gas emissions would be incredibly costly. Yet the most careful studies, like the big MIT study of Congressional proposals, find only modest costs. Pay no attention, say the critics. Via Pete Davis, I found Robert [...:]
Arlen Specter's party switch isn't all that startling. Richard Shelby and Ben Nighthorse Campbell switched to the Republicans right after the 1994 election, without (as far as I know) facing the same kind of primary challenge. But this switch is especially important, because once Al Franken finally gets seated it will give the Democrats the [...:]
So Bobby Jindal makes fun of "volcano monitoring", and soon afterwards Mt. Redoubt erupts. Susan Collins makes sure that funds for pandemic protection are stripped from the stimulus bill, and the swine quickly attack. What else did the right oppose recently? I just want enough information to take cover.
Keiichiro Kobayashi accuses me of wanting to disregard the problems of the banks and focus only on fiscal expansion. Actually, I've never said that; he seems to have me confused with Robert Reich, who has. But it's true that I'm a bit puzzled by the attribution of Japan's recovery to bank reform. If the bank-reform story [...:]
One of the really bad arguments against temporary receivership for troubled banks is that we just have too many banks. Unfortunately, among those rolling out that argument has been the president. So it's worth quoting from the otherwise not very informative Fed report on the stress tests: All domestic BHCs with year‐end 2008 assets exceeding $100 [...:]
