New York Employment Datapoint of the Day
From Richard Florida’s Atlantic cover story: Financial positions account for only about 8 percent of the New York area’s jobs, not too far off the national average of 5.5 percent. By contrast, they...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Extra Credit, Sunday Edition
GM to Offer Two Choices: Bankruptcy or More Aid: And if it gets the "more aid", it’ll surely be back for yet more later. This risks becoming the bottomless bailout. Do Androids Dream of...
View ArticleJapan’s Whiplash
Edward Hugh has a good summary of what he calls Japan’s “unimaginable” contraction — the one which resulted in that 12.7% annualized fall in GDP in the fourth quarter. One important lesson, here, is...
View ArticleThe Kanjorski Meme, Mark II
Tyler Cowen is now talking about the Kanjorski Meme Mark I (I thought I’d dealt with that one already) — but that’s not the end of the story, as Sam Jones demonstrates today. Sam has what you might...
View ArticleHow the Economic Sausage is Made
Gregory Clark reveals all: Recently a group of economists affiliated with the Cato Institute ran an ad in the New York Times opposing the Obama stimulus plan. As chair of my department I tried to...
View ArticleThe Psychic Bailout
Guess what? It turns out that hope is a plan, after all! Six middle-aged Englishwomen have decided that they can get the country to "overcome whatever obstacles and difficulties we may face as a...
View ArticleAmerica’s Insolvent Banks
John Hempton has 5,155 words on bank insolvency today, and makes the good point that "insolvency" is not well-defined. So what do I mean when I say that some big banks are insolvent? I mean that when...
View ArticleAlex Dalmady, the MSM, and Stanford
Alex Dalmady, the analyst who broke the Stanford story, has a blog now, and he’s not afraid to use it: his latest blog entry has appeared with the headline "The WALL STREET JOURNAL can kiss my ass!":...
View ArticleExtra Credit, Monday Edition
Wristcutters: An Economic Story: My Bloggingheads diavlog with Jesse Eisinger. Saving Federal Arts Funds: Selling Culture as an Economic Force: The Senate voted against it, but $50 million in extra...
View ArticleStanford vs Citi
Comment of the day comes from John Slater: You’ve had some interesting posts on Stanford. It appears that they have taken deposits to acquire trading/speculative assets. Not sure that what the big...
View ArticleGeithner’s Vagueness Explained
How could Geithner’s much-vaunted financial rescue plan have been so stunningly vague on arrival, given the amount of time he’d worked on it? The Washington Post reveals that in fact he’d only been...
View ArticleGE Datapoint of the Day
Rolfe Winkler has run the numbers on how GE compares to other banks (yes, GE is a bank) and has come to the conclusion that as of December 31, GE had total tangible common equity of… wait for it… $5...
View ArticleTaxing Falling Carbon Emissions
Back in November 2007, in a long post on the relative merits of a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade system, I said that one big advantage of cap-and-trade was that it was "a dynamic hedge of fat-tail CO2...
View ArticleStanford: The SEC Moves
The SEC has frozen all the assets of Allen Stanford and his companies, as well as those of his CFO and CIO. I think you can guess why: The SEC’s complaint, filed in federal court in Dallas, alleges...
View ArticleHighlights of the SEC Complaint Against Stanford
The SEC complaint against Stanford is quite astonishing. Here are some of the highlights, which include a slew of outright lies and even an investment with Bernie Madoff. Impossibly, Stanford’s...
View ArticleStanford: How Quickly did the SEC Move?
According to the SEC press release, it has acted with lightning speed: Said Linda Chatman Thomsen, Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement: "We are moving quickly and decisively in this...
View ArticleMillennium: A Stanford Copy-Cat
Adrienne Carter has found what looks very much to be the first — but surely not the last — of banks which won’t withstand much if any scrutiny in the wake of the Stanford collapse. Does any of this...
View ArticleStanford: The Manhunt Begins
Given the amount of time that the SEC and the media have been sniffing around his operation, today’s fraud charges can’t have come as much surprise to Allen Stanford. And given that he owns banks in...
View ArticleAllen Stanford, Ponzi Operator
Patrick Kidd says that Allen Stanford is "another victim of the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s"; Joe Wiesenthal says that nobody is accusing Stanford of being another Ponzi scheme. So before...
View ArticleAdventures in Flackery, Private Jet Edition
Two high-profile financial columnists filed two strikingly similar opinions on corporate jets today: A private plane is really a flying office. It is a way for a busy executive to get from one place to...
View Article