From Jonathan Landay at McClatchy, one of the few reporters to get the story right during the march to war: The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a [...:]
So the market was greatly reassured when Tim Geithner declared that the "vast majority" of banks are well capitalized. Count me as baffled. I mean, maybe he was actually giving us a hint about the stress tests - but I took it as a remark that was uninformative at best, ominous at worst. After all, there [...:]
I really can't remember a time when I anxiously scanned the IMF's website to see what has just been released - or when so many of the Fund's reports were best read sitting down, with a cup of herbal tea. A few days ago it was the "analytical" chapters of the World Economic Outlook, with [...:]
The local Sovereign Bank has posters in the window advertising the fact that it's owned by Spain's Santander. "Part of one of the world's safest banks", the posters boast.
"pretty soon, even here in Washington, it adds up to real money," says the president. Except, you know, really it doesn't. Let's say the administration finds $100 million in efficiencies every working day for the rest of the Obama administration's first term. That's still around $80 billion, or around 2% of one year's federal spending. OK, politics [...:]
A followup to my previous post. Here's how I think about it: you started a business with a bunch of borrowed money, but of course had to put some of your own money in. Now, actually some of the money you put in was borrowed from your mother, but the original lenders don't care about [...:]
I've been getting some reactions from the Emerald Isle, and a lot of them come down to this: OK as far as it goes, but I didn't sufficiently emphasize the crony capitalism aspect. True: I was aware of all that, but it didn't make it into my story, and perhaps it should have. Of course, today's [...:]
OK, I don't get the latest bank-rescue idea: converting TARP preferred shares to common equity. It really does seem to fall into the shuffling-the-deck-chairs category. James Kwak basically does the same analysis I did. Here's my way of thinking about it: it's all about seniority. What, after all, is the purpose of bank capital? It's to [...:]
Matthew Yglesias notes that Tom DeLay is under the strange misapprehension that Texas is rich thanks to its low taxes and lack of regulation. Just one minor issue: you really shouldn't use median income, which can be distorted to the extent that inequality differs across states. You should instead use income per capita. As it happens, [...:]
I don't know how I missed this before, but the blog The Irish Economy has just joined my must-read list. It's not all about Ireland, and anyway Ireland basically is just like us, only more so. Among other things, the blog has hosted a high-quality debate about the pros and cons of nationalization. Let me [...:]
