Tim Burke expresses his outrage at the oversized sense of entitlement reflected in Jake DeSantis' letter of resignation from AIG. Next, two commentators show up and demonstrate not only a sense of...
And just complete the nationalization process.In return for the bailout, the government took an 80 percent ownership stake in the company. Liddy was recruited by former Treasury secretary Henry M....
If I were to speculate on what circumstances might lead to a significant curtailment of central bank autonomy in the United States, I imagine I would come up with a scenario that looks something...
The Chinese Communist Party has sunk all of its legitimacy, understandably, into the continued growth of the Chinese economy and a steady increase in their citizens' standard of living. One of the "nightmare" scenarios for China watchers is that, faced with an inability to generate enough jobs to satisfy domestic needs, the party turns to aggressive nationalism as an alternative means of staying in power. But with thawing relations between Taiwan and China, the party's targets are more limited than they once were. So what to do? How about force companies to continue employing...
Binyamin Appelbaum writes in the Washington Post that:U.S. banks getting more than $163 billion from the Treasury Department for new lending are on pace to pay more than half of that sum to their shareholders, with government permission, over the next three years.The government said it was giving banks more money so they could make more loans. Dollars paid to shareholders don't serve that purpose, but Treasury officials say that suspending quarterly dividend payments would have deterred banks from participating in the voluntary program.I don't know why anyone thought putting the...
Nothing like a global financial crisis to make the IMF relevant again.In all seriousness, though, after the 1997 East Asian financial crisis it seemed that the IMF was in danger of irrelevance. Very few countries were willing to accept the conditions required by the IMF for loans. But with the world only a few steps back from the brink, that appears to be changing. And with the outcome of the Ukraine-IMF negotiations pending, we may soon get a sense of how much the IMF is willing to require in exchange for cash infusions.
If British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have their way, the advanced industrialized nations will come together to negotiate a new economic order. But they will do so in a world in which the US and the European Union enjoy roughly equal GDP (with a slight advantage for the EU right now). When Bretton Woods was negotiated, in contrast, the US controlled about half of global economic production.In other words, any such bargain would be the product less of US hegemony than US-EU comity, with China, Japan, and India as important players in the mix. This is,...
Switzerland is bailing out UBS, but some say the banking system won't melt down. The lead story on the Financial Times website?IMF ready to help stabilise UkraineThe credit crisis deepened as Hungary and Ukraine turned to international institutions in an effort to avoid following Iceland into financial turmoil and US industrial production suffered its largest monthly decline since 1974.I don't think this is what McCain meant when he told us to "watch Ukraine."
When Obama's participation in an anti-redlining lawsuit is characterized as a "smoking gun" for his culpability in the current crisis, I know that we're through the looking glass.The bizarreness of attempts to blame the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and ACORN for the current subprime crisis is so totally bizarre that it raises an important question: is the point of all of this to (1) simply find some way, no matter how warped, to blame Obama for the crisis or (2) also to plant the seeds for a campaign to bring back discriminatory lending practices?
the peoples of the advanced industrial countries could live in Zimbabwe.Zimbabwe's annual inflation rate - already the world's highest - has soared to 231,000,000%, newly released official figures for July show.The rise - from 11,200,000% last month - was largely due to increases in the prices of bread and cereals.A landmark power-sharing deal between President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has failed to ease the country's economic crisis.I bet the Icelanders didn't realize that they had it so good.
Brad DeLong finds... uh... fault with McCain's "game changer."His conclusion?There's a big difference here: Democrats want to prevent depression and support the financial markets by investing taxpayer money in banks with troubled assets. Republicans want to give taxpayers money away to the shareholders and managers of banks with troubled assets.I would say that this is unbelievable, but I do believe it.My guess, however, is that most Republicans don't want to do this. Those "reaction meters" took a nosedive among Republicans when McCain proposed the plan at last night's debate.Anyway, I get...