Paul Krugman's Blog, page 639

Signs of the times

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.

$100 million here, $100 million there

"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 [...:]

Preferred shares to common equity: an analogy

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 [...:]

Irish cronies

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 [...:]

Bank bafflement

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 [...:]

Poor Texas

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, [...:]

Shabby Celtic tigers

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 [...:]

Is inflation the answer?

Greg Mankiw says yes. Since that was the answer I arrived at for Japan more than a decade ago, I have to say that it makes sense in principle.
But here's why it won't work now, at least not yet: we're talking about making a credible commitment to fairly high inflation over the medium term, [...:]

183

Back from a partly medical absence. Before I do some economics posts, I think I ought to say something about the torture memos - namely, that there is now no way to view the people who ruled us these past 8 years as anything but monsters. We had all these rationalizations of torture over the [...:]

Post a Comment About 'Green Shoots and Glimmers'

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