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Exploding Cars for Beginners
Mark Thoma does a nice job comparing government purchases, public-private partnerships, and nationalization, and gets the concluding paragraph exactly right. It won’t help you through the complexities...
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Will It Work?
Leaving aside the question of subsidies, which has gotten piles of attention on the Internet, Simon and I are skeptical that the Geithner Plan will achieve its basic objective: getting enough toxic...
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Does Size Matter?
Simon argued in the Atlantic article, and I argued in “Frog and Toad” and “Big and Small”, that the best way to regulate the financial sector is to limit the size of individual institutions. In the...
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Is Goldman Really That Good?
Goldman Sachs released its quarterly earnings yesterday, and the headline was net income of $1.8 billion, doubling analysts’ estimates. I would say this is definitely good news for Goldman; whether...
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New Day, New Bank, Same Story
JPMorgan Chase reported its quarterly earnings today. The headline was $2.1 billion in net income, beating analysts’ estimates. Behind the headlines, it was similar to the story that Goldman told...
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Who Had This Good Idea First? (A Weekend Comment Competition)
In early February, James proposed that bankers’ bonuses be paid out in “toxic assets” – after all, the industry was arguing that these would definitely rebound (“it’s just a liquidity problem”) and...
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New Day, New Bank, Worse Story
It’s a beautiful day today, and after Goldman and JPMorgan, I don’t feel like diving deep into Citigroup’s earnings release. But judging from the Bloomberg article, it’s a similar story, just not as...
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The Missed Opportunity
For a snapshot of what’s wrong with our banking policy, look at the front page of the business section of today’s New York Times. On the left side: “U.S. in Standoff with Banks over Chrysler.” On the...
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Recently Bailed-Out Banks Refuse to Take California IOUs
The Wall Street Journal (via Calculated Risk) reports that a group of large banks has announced that it will not accept IOUs issued by the state of California. The group includes the four horsemen of...
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Soaking Customers as a Form of Prudential Regulation
Good for Deputy Treasury Secretary (and YLS alumnus) Neal Wolin for wading into the American Bankers Association to defend the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. According to FinReg21′s article:...
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Who Needs Big Banks?
At a panel discussion at the Pew Charitable Trusts (captured for posterity by Planet Money), Alice Rivlin floated the idea of breaking up big banks. Luckily for us, Scott Talbott of the Financial...
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$3 Billion Banks
By James Kwak Jon Macey is no friend of regulation. In 1994, he wrote a paper titled “Administrative Agency Obsolescence and Interest Group Formation: A Case Study of the SEC at Sixty” arguing, in no...
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Oblivious
By James Kwak Benjamin Lawsky’s unilateral action against Standard Chartered has apparently upset the “bigger” regulators in Washington and London. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Officials at...
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The Conspiracy Behind the B of A “Mistake”
By James Kwak Some very clever people deep in the bowels of Bank of America’s accounting and regulatory compliance departments came up with a clever strategy to show, once and for all, that their bank...
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And the Award for Best Financial Crisis Book …
… goes to Chain of Title, by David Dayen (with apologies to Jennifer Taub, Alyssa Katz, Michael Lewis, and many others, including my co-author, Simon Johnson). Chain of Title isn’t primarily about the...
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