For the past year, I have been advising a start-up, FedWise LLC, that is working to improve American’s financial literacy. (Full disclosure: I have a small interest in the company.) FedWise’s vision is simple: to provide helpful, unbiased, reliable information to consumers about financial products and services like mortgages and credit cards. The company recently [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Finance’
Financial Answers Made Simple
Posted in Finance, Business, tagged Finance, Start Up on February 12, 2012 | 1 Comment »
How Fast Does the Stock Market Forget False News? About Seven Days
Posted in Business, Finance, tagged Finance, Stock Market, UAL on October 5, 2011 | 2 Comments »
The New York Federal Reserve just posted an entertaining analysis of an “Internet blooper” that struck UAL, the parent company of United Airlines a few years ago. As authors Carlos Carvalho, Nicholas Klagge, and Emanuel Moench note in a blog post: On September 8, 2008, a six-year-old article about the 2002 bankruptcy of United Airlines’ parent [...]
Playing with Fire with the Debt Limit
Posted in Budget, Finance, Politics, tagged Debt, Debt Limit, Finance, Politics, Treasury on June 24, 2011 | 3 Comments »
My latest column in the Christian Science Monitor: America sometimes takes its exceptionalism too far. Case in point: We are the only major economy that talks openly of default. Government debt has ballooned throughout the developed world in the aftermath of the Great Recession. France and Britain are as deep in debt as the United States, [...]
Europe and the Financial Crisis
Posted in Economy, Finance, International, Macroeconomics, tagged Finance, International, Macroeconomics on January 16, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Over the New York Times Magazine, Paul Krugman has today’s must-read economics article on the fate of Europe. (Today’s in the physical world; it’s been up electronically for several days.) Krugman walks through various ways that struggling Eurozone members might adjust to their ongoing financial crisis. Along the way, he emphasizes a key point: American [...]
Federal Reserve Earned $81 Billion in 2010
Posted in Budget, Finance, Macroeconomics, tagged Budget, Federal Reserve, Finance on January 11, 2011 | 2 Comments »
The Federal Reserve system is doing its part to cut the budget deficit. The central bank earned $81 billion in fiscal 2010, of which a bit more than $78 billion will be remitted to the Treasury. That’s $31 billion more than last year. According to the Fed’s news release yesterday, the following items drove profits: $76.2 billion [...]
CBO Weighs in on Fannie and Freddie
Posted in Budget, Finance, Regulation, tagged CBO, Fannie Mae, Finance, Freddie Mac, GSE, Housing, Regulation on December 23, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released its long-awaited report on the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Role in the Secondary Mortgage Market (written by Deborah Lucas and David Torregrosa, with input from a cast of dozens — including, full disclosure, me as an outside reviewer) provides an [...]
A Second Thought on the Cost of TARP
Posted in Budget, Finance, tagged AIG, Auto, Banks, Budget, CBO, Finance, TARP on December 1, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Two commenters (Jack B. and John L.) raise an important point about the $25 billion price tag that the Congressional Budget Office recently placed on the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Their concern is that the $25 billion figure includes some impacts that should rightfully be attributed to other government actions, not to TARP itself. To illustrate, suppose that [...]
How Much Did TARP Cost? $25 Billion
Posted in Budget, Finance, tagged AIG, Auto, Banks, Budget, CBO, Finance, TARP on November 29, 2010 | 15 Comments »
The much-maligned TARP program will cost taxpayers only $25 billion according to the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. That’s substantially less than the $66 billion CBO estimated back in August or the $113 billion that the Office of Management and Budget estimated in October. The good news, budget-wise, is that the government is [...]
Positive Feedback and the Flash Crash
Posted in Finance, Regulation, tagged Finance, Regulation, Stock Market on October 1, 2010 | 3 Comments »
The CFTC and SEC staffs are out with their analysis of the May 6 “flash crash.” Short version: A large trader (identified by the media as Waddell & Reed) initiated a large sell order to be executed based on volume, not time or price. The initial selling boosted trading volumes which prompted the algorithm to sell [...]
Another Observation on the Yield Curve
Posted in Finance, Microeconomics, tagged Finance, Interest Rates, Macroeconomics, Recession on August 29, 2010 | 1 Comment »
As a follow-up to my recent post about recessions and the yield curve, reader Joan F. points us to a piece by the FT’s James Mackintosh. The money quote: [T]hose keeping faith in recovery also point to the fact that the yield curve has not inverted – 10-year bonds still yield 2 percentage points more [...]
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