The Best Laid Plans Of Mice and Men

The Obama Administration just handed Congress a $3.6 trillion budget.  The budget is one of the best ways of seeing what a President lays out as priorities and can be linked to many campaign promises.  While it demonstrates a vision, what remains after congress hacks through it tends to be a more reliable gauge of [...]

Quantifying the Unquantifiable

I found this neat article on 13 tipping points by Market Watch’s Paul Farrell.  I managed to read it in between multi-napping and watching the Dow go down in response to the the State of the Union Address and bad  numbers coming out of housing.  Then, I watched the market return to a more neutral [...]

It’s Mardi Gras: You know, the Party before Penitence?

I’m sitting here watching the kids get their costumes together for the big day of celebration called Fat Tuesday.  That’s the day when you pull out all the stops because you know lean days (no meat, no alcohol, no fun) starts tomorrow.  I guess I must be in hyper-metaphorical mode because it’s really striking me [...]

WTF? Pre-Determined Stress Tests?

I finally have a bit of time to catch up on reading.  I’m hosting 10 of my youngest daughter’s college friends for Mardi Gras in a very small house and it’s as wild as it sounds.  I read this on Naked Capitalism and just didn’t even know what to say.   So I’m going to throw [...]

It Ain’t Over until the Eagle Grins

Paul Krugman’s column in yesterday’s NY Times talked about the economic outlook report released by the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy ‘deciders’, the Open Market Committee.  He’s been obsessing on one little sentence.
But my eye was caught by the following chilling passage (yes, things are so bad that the summarized musings of central bankers can keep [...]

Mortgaged Home, Sweet Mortgaged Home

Obama announced more details on his bailout plan that was focused more on borrowers instead of the lenders.  He released a four page fact sheet here.  There are three portions and The Economist does a pretty good job of summarizing them here.
First, the administration will increase the number of homeowners able to refinance at current, [...]

Moral Hazard and Corporate Governance

I usually stick with the Economics side of my degree instead of the Finance when I blog because macroeconomics is highly linked to politics and policy.  Today, I’m going to switch over to the one field specialty I took in graduate school that’s not considered economics.  (My economics fields are monetary [...]

Where’s the Reform?

We keep hearing about the global financial collapse and how several things played into its creation. Since the credit markets are mostly dried up, loose credit to purchase overpriced assets is no longer an issue. Still hanging out there with no real substantive policy discussion is Financial Reform. Has the current administration [...]

Systematic Banking Crises: Learning from the Past

I’ve had some more questions recently about the banking situation so I’m going to try cover some of it here.   People are worried that the TARP and bailout plans really won’t work and will cost a lot of money.
I covered some of this in October when the IMF came out with a working paper [...]

Americans Tighten their Belts

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the American Consumer is drastically reducing their spending on food.   They’re reporting that restaurant patronage is way down and that households are opting for generic products and home brewed coffee. They’ve also begun bargain shopping.
In 2008’s fourth quarter, consumer spending on food fell at an inflation-adjusted 3.7% from [...]