Economy

Here is a good video from Marketplace Senior Editor Paddy Hirsch explaining the mechanics of the now infamous Lehman Brothers 105 transactions. One or two tidbits, first. Even though Hirsch mentions Lehman undertook these transactions to…

China and commodities bull Jim Rogers thinks the economy is going to eventually run out of gas by 2012. While he doesn’t call this a double dip, he does say that “the next time it’s going to be worse because we’ve shot all of our bullets.”…

This is a post from John Lounsbury. Charles J. Antonucci Sr., the former president and chief executive of the Park Avenue Bank of New York, made a desperate move to try to save his bank with the infusion of TARP funds. TARP refers to the…

Last week the federal Reserve released its quarterly flow of funds data. I have been unusually slow to parse the numbers. But I did do a very comprehensive sweep of the historical data in an October 2009 post called A brief look at the…

As Irwin Stelzer argued in a recent opinion article in the Wall Street Journal, Spain’s Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero seems to be an admirer of Charles Dickens's character Mr. Micawber. When asked what he plans to do about…

Gallup shows President Obama’s approval rating tied for a low of 48% in the most recent polling. But if you look at the data split by party, it’s like we’re living in three separate worlds. Obama’s personal numbers have fallen…

I was talking to a friend of mine who does emerging market investing for a living and I asked him what he made of recent China-bullish comments by Stephen Roach.  The Morgan Stanley Asia head was in Germany speaking to German…

Well, I for one can’t help thinking that it’s now well time we all stopped getting carried away with the use of so many acronyms. Not only may one man’s meat easily prove to be another’s poison, it may even be that for some the entire meal…

Michael Lewis is out with a new book “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” which discusses how the big hitters on Wall Street destroyed $1.75 trillion of capital. His phrase ‘Doomsday Machine’ is reminiscent of former IMF chief…

The video below from the Wall Street Journal gets at the heart of why the bailouts have been so toxic for the economy. Banks, still laden with existing bad loans to small businesses, are unwilling to make new ones. Businesses, unable to…