Once upon a time, there was a hedge fund named Hermitage Capital. Its head was Bill Browder, and it had the clever idea, back during the Yeltsin Administration, of investing Western capital in Russia. It worked spectacularly well, until it didn’t: Browder is a smart guy. He made a lot of money and managed to [...]
Archive for the ‘Meltdown’ Category
Home Court Advantage
Posted in China, Corruption, Dick Cheney, Energy Policy, Foreigners, France, Labor Policy, Meltdown, Middle East, Military, Obama, Russia on October 16, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Market v Business
Posted in Ben Bernanke, Corruption, George W. Bush, Labor Policy, Meltdown, Obama, Tim Geithner on October 14, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Luigi Zingales has an excellent article for National Affairs that tries to place what has been so special about the American economic system…and why it is particularly vulnerable today: Capitalism has long enjoyed exceptionally strong public support in the United States because America’s form of capitalism has long been distinct from those found elsewhere in [...]
Foxes Guarding the Henhouse
Posted in Food, Football, George W. Bush, Health Care, Meltdown, Obama, Tim Geithner on October 5, 2009 | 8 Comments »
The basic story is tragic if common: person eats food, person gets sick from food. In this case, the person was a young Minnesota dance instructor named Stephanie Smith, and the food was ground beef processed by Cargill in Wisconsin from sources in Nebraska, Texas, South Dakota, and Uraguay and contaminated with the E.coli bacteria, [...]
Tell Us What You Really Want
Posted in Corruption, Housing Crisis, Housing Policy, Meltdown on October 1, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Courtesy of Mike Konczal at Rortybomb (itself a thoughtful compilation of a variety of articles, especially this one from Interfluidity), this gem from the Mortgage Bankers Association: The centerpiece of MBA’s recommendation is the creation of a new line of mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Each security would have two components – a loan level guarantee provided by [...]
The World Upside Down
Posted in Corruption, Meltdown, Obama, Tim Geithner on September 24, 2009 | 4 Comments »
The Kansas Supreme Court has given, if not the green light, at least a very long yellow to people who want to try to drag out foreclosure processes with versions of the “show the note” strategy: [I]n the event that a mortgage loan somehow separates interests of the note and the deed of trust, with [...]
Turf War Run Wild
Posted in Corruption, Meltdown, Tim Geithner on September 23, 2009 | 11 Comments »
The FDIC is nearly out of cash, the victim of almost a hundred bank failures this year and a few particularly large ones last year. Now, that shouldn’t be too big of a problem (it may be a symptom of a problem) in and of itself; after all, the FDIC is a government agency, and [...]
Creativity
Posted in Inspirational, Meltdown on September 19, 2009 | 5 Comments »
It seems Barclays had a problem with $12.3bn of junk assets (thank you James Kwak). The damn things were liable to keep falling in value, and every fall tears a further hole in the bank’s balance sheet. What to do, what to do? Undoubtedly, someone called a meeting. And that meeting led to another meeting, [...]
Hazards
Posted in Meltdown, Obama, Tim Geithner on September 16, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Johnson and Kwak hit the big time: a Washington Post column on the anniversary of the Lehman failure. Like most people, they take the position that letting Lehman fail was a mistake. It is a curious read side by side with Cochrane and Zingales’ Wall Street Journal piece, which includes this blast from the already-cloudy [...]
Reform Week: Finance Industry
Posted in Finance, Meltdown on September 8, 2009 | 27 Comments »
It has been a year since the Federal government absorbed Fannie and Freddie and crossed, however unknowingly, the Rubicon of nationalizing the consequences of private risk-taking. A few weeks later we had Lehman, and then immediately the drunken fire brigade: Reserve Fund, AIG, the conversion of Goldman and Morgan Stanley, and TARP and its variants. [...]
Stop Digging
Posted in Housing Crisis, Housing Policy, Meltdown, Tim Geithner on September 4, 2009 | 13 Comments »
Courtesy of Calculated Risk, a fantastic example of the government’s inability to grasp the root cause of our economic woes: The Federal Housing Administration, hit by increasing mortgage-related losses, is in danger of seeing its reserves fall below the level demanded by Congress…”They’re probably going to need a bailout at some point because they’re making [...]
