Posts tagged “Bailouts”
Extortion, Nullification And Other Washington Games
(1) How is this not extortion? Sens. Richard Shelby (R-AL) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) announced today that “they are blocking President Barack Obama’s nomination of Ashton Carter as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics.” The senators want assurances that Carter will not “change the criteria” on which the Pentagon considers a refueling [...]
My Selected Collected Thoughts On The Whole GM Thing
(1) Why all the fuss about the unequal treatment of GM CEO Rick Wagoner and, say, Vikram Pandit of Shittygroup? Didn’t we always know that all CEOs are equal but some CEOs are more equal than others? Which pigs was George Orwell writing about if not the proverbial capitalist pigs? (2) The thoroughly inestimable Charles [...]
Hank Hangs His Hat
Paulson’s Next Stop: Johns Hopkins Washington Post (1/16/09): Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said yesterday that he has decided to take a position at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies after he leaves the Treasury Department. His exact title has yet to be worked out, said a spokeswoman for the school in [...]
Timing The News Market
The New York Times has a story in today’s paper that will probably attract some attention. That’s despite being buried on page 4 of the Business section. The headline reads: A.I.G. Sues U.S. for Return of $306 Million in Tax Payments . Something about that will probably strike a political nerve, one imagines. While the [...]
Bonus Payments Need A New Name
Nobody has ever pretended that the $165 million AIG paid out in bonuses to employees of their London unit — the unit which caused all the losses which required the spectacular and ongoing bailout of the company — constitute a conventional performance bonus. What they did pretend — and this has been a common pretense [...]
Truth-in-Journalism
Here’s what passes for responsible journalism these days. The story says: But the revelations that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars were funneled through AIG to Goldman Sachs — one of Wall Street’s most politically connected firms — and to European banks including Deutsche Bank, France’s Societe Generale and the UK’s Barclays could stoke further outrage [...]
Will The Uniquely Qualified Timothy Geithner Please Stand Up?
It’s been more than six weeks since Timothy Geithner was sworn in as Treasury Secretary. Despite being caught red-handed cheating on his taxes. Because he was so uniquely qualified that no one else could possibly fix the economy as brilliantly as he could and would. So when exactly does Timothy start walking on water? Isn’t [...]
A Simple Past-And-Future History Of The Financial Crisis
For everyone whose eyes glaze over when discussions of the financial market meltdown dissolve into a mess of technical terms and abbreviations, John Carney provides a short and simple past-and-future history, in the guise of discussing the possible suspension of mark-to-market rules. Very good stuff! Talking about accounting rules is famously obscure, my-eyes-glaze over stuff. [...]
Lessons From TARP For The Financial Stability Plan
Two Harvard professors — John C. Coates from the Law School and David S. Scharfstein from the Business School — had an op-ed in the NYT yesterday in which they identified a basic design flaw in TARP. Their criticism is simple and cogent, and doesn’t require any background in economics to understand, yet it has [...]
Wall Street Bonuses And Profitability
A story by Reuters on Friday, about the “retention awards” at Morgan Stanley and Citigroup’s Smith Barney, has a classic paragraph, which goes a long way towards explaining the bonus culture of Wall Street, and casts a very dubious light on its profitability model: According to the newspaper, not all of the joint venture’s 20,000 [...]