Lehman Brothers: Who Gets Hurt?

Matt Yglesias snarks, Unlike the guy who runs Lehman Brothers, the guys who clean the bathrooms in the Lehman Brothers office have, as best one can tell, been doing an excellent job. And yet if the company going under results in everyone involved losing their jobs, the guy who runs Lehman will wind up being better off than the guys who ...

The ‘Too Big to Fail’ Problem

Now that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have joined the "too big to fail" club, isn't it high time we started thinking about how to avoid allowing companies and other quasi-private agencies to get into these problems in the first place? It seems that over the past few decades, the Federal government has pretty much given carte blanche for ...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Bailout Debacle

The widespread rumors of a government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have already had dramatic consequences, perhaps creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Iain Dey and Dominic Rushe, writing for The Times of London, note that, "The two companies lost almost half their market value last week as rumours of a government bail-out swept the stock markets, hammering share ...

Obama’s ‘Sweetheart’ Home Loan

The Manufactured Outrage of the Day comes to us from Joe Stephens and his page A3 piece for today's Washington Post, "Obama Got Discount on Home Loan." Shortly after joining the U.S. Senate and while enjoying a surge in income, Barack Obama bought a $1.65 million restored Georgian mansion in an upscale Chicago neighborhood. To finance the purchase, he secured a ...

Subsidizing Home Ownership

Ezra Klein jumps on a growing meme the home ownership isn't all it's cracked up to be and that the government should stop subsidizing it. He points to Paul Krugman, who argues in today's NYT that it's time to rethink our decades-long bipartisan consensus that home ownership should be encouraged. While everyone stresses the advantages of owning ...

Getting to Know Obama

Howard Fineman thinks we have learned a lot about Barack Obama from the Jim Johnson incident. We know John McCain: as formed and familiar as a well-worn boot. But we don't know Barack Obama very well, and getting to know him has been and remains the basic national task of 2008. With less than five months until Election Day, there isn't ...

Chrysler Cashflow Crisis

Frank Williams reports that Chrysler is having serious cashflow problems and has taken a novel approach to dealing with it: "Chrysler will now be taking five percent off all [purchase orders] PO's and will take 60 days to pay instead of 45." This applies "to all existing orders, not just future orders." I would love to implement such a system ...

President of the United States: Chief Job Placement Official

It's not change when he offers four more years of Bush economic policies that have failed to create well-paying jobs,… --Barack Obama, Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: Final Primary Night I heard that and the first thought that went through my head was, “Since when did the President of the United States become in charge of placing people in well paying jobs?” ...

ABC News Debate Focuses on ‘News’

ABC News hosted the Democratic debate in Philadelphia last night, with anchors Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous asking the questions. Shockingly, they selected questions on the basis of what they've been covering in recent days, namely Bittergate, patriotism, various campaign faux pas and countercharges, and so forth. This has pretty much everybody except David Brooks upset. I'm ...

Economic Hysteria

Alan Reynolds over at the Cato Institute puts the current financial crisis into perspective, and notes that the current financial crisis isn't nearly as a bad as many people seem to thing. Media hysteria over the mortgage crisis is almost certainly misleading countless people about prospects for the real economy. The US economy is likely in recession. Yet even that conclusion may ...