Musical Interlude

Among the people who have been updating The Theory of Finance for the ObamaNation is Gregg Sommerville, whose job depends to some significant extent on people not believing the following riff:More...

This is What a Giant Vampire Squid Looks Like

Via Greg Mitchell's Twitter feed, lying isn't just for the IB branch any more: Goldman declined for three years to confirm their suspicions that it had bought their mortgages from a subprime lender,...

Thanks to Ben Bernanke, Ben Bernanke Doesn't Need to be Reappointed as Fed Chair

by Tom BozzoBack in 2005, I argued at Old Marginal Utility that "Greenspan exceptionalism" was not very well founded in that observers rarely engaged in a proper counterfactual analysis of how well...

Awkward story for Barney Frank

This is an awkward story for Barney Frank. I particularly like how he absolves the bank of blame because they bought Fanny stock and it's the government's fault that the stock is worthless, not...

PPIP: Bad, Maybe, But Not THAT bad

Tom BozzoI've been hearing about various potential schemes to game the PPIP, and Jeffrey Sachs gets in on the action with a pure self-dealing scenario (via Americablog):Here's how. Consider a toxic...