journalism

There has been quite a lot of hub-bub today about President Obama’s fat cat remarks and his meeting with bankers exhorting them to lend. Let me tie these events in with a few other themes into a comprehensive picture of what is happening in…

There will be no Dubai sovereign default. The government of oil-rich Abu Dhabi surprised investors this morning in announcing a $10 billion rescue package to pay for upcoming obligations of embattled Dubai World. Below Richard…

Today is the first anniversary of Bernie Madoff's scam of the century which defrauded investors out of tens of billions. The former fund manager and head of NASDAQ who ran the world's largest ever financial fraud seems to be a hit in prison…

Yesterday, I linked out to a Gallup poll which detailed self-reported average daily spending by income bracket.  The poll showed wealthy Americans reporting a 14% fall in spend in November while middle- and lower-income Americans…

Paul Krugman and Bruce Bartlett debated on PBS whether President Obama should divert money from the TARP program to a jobs program to combat high unemployment (Hat tip Mark Thoma).  Here is the video and a transcript of part of the…

Hat Tip Tim Iacono

(Video embedded above)

I happen to think we are in (an unsustainable) recovery. And that means that the labour market, while poor is improving.  This is why my headline from the latest employment figures was “Unemployment rate recedes as worst of this…

Recently, I have been writing a lot about regional banks and the capital problems they have been having. This is having a direct impact on lending capacity available to small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) and households. As a result, a…

Below are three videos from a talk at the 2009 Economics of Peace Conference in Sonoma, CA, where James Galbraith talks about the Hyman Minsky concept of the instability of stability. This concept is fundamental to the behavioural…