Credit Writedowns

I wrote a post earlier today on kleptocracy and the one-party system of government that I thought was pretty explicit.  But, judging from the comments, particularly at Naked capitalism, apparently I have to spell it out – tell readers…

This comes from the up until New Year’s aptly-titled “News from 1930” website.  It’s now really News from 1931 as it chronicles news during the Great Depression from exactly 79 years ago to the day. US car and truck exhibitors at…

This quote from Caroline Baum sums things up pretty well about the Fed's complicity in blowing a massive bubble in housing and in stocks before it. I know Bernanke has given this issue a great deal of thought and devoted the Fed’s…

As a writer, Matt Taibbi is a lot more vitriolic than I am. He curses, makes some pretty over-the-top personal attacks, and divines a policymaker’s intent where I don’t think he can. But, this goes mostly to style.  Substantively…

In addition to these non-finance links, I am also adding a few missed items to the financial news links post that I caught after I originally published it. Hat tip to mark Thoma on these. Observations: Obesity is now just as much of a…

ataxingmatter: More on freshwater economics  (This post certainly gives a lot more credit to Keynes than I would. But it does point out the 'ideology' behind the extreme version of freshwater economics that is being peddled today…

Given the fact that I have just finished writing two articles on Wien’s predictions for 2010, I thought it relevant to look back at the last three years of Wien’s surprises to just before the housing crisis.  I posted the 2009 predictions…

Employees of US states and cities have much better pension plans than do Average Americans and this is creating some serious budgetary problems, one reason to be very careful in assessing municipal bonds, particularly general revenue ones.…

Marshall Auerback here with a commentary on Robert Rubin’s recent Newsweek article on getting the economy back on track. As we all know, during his tenure as Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin laid the groundwork for today's crisis through…

Byron Wien was amazingly accurate last year in his economic predictions even though his annual list is an attempt to build a non-consensus list of likely outlier events. So, I was eager to see Byron Wien's 2010 surprises, which were…