Amidst the orgy of one-year-on reminiscing in September, I missed Kirsten Grind's 4,000-word story on the failure of WaMu, which is well worth reading.
She gives a great impression, for instance, of what a bank runs look like, circa 2008:
A longtime customer in Orange County brought a cake to her' [...]
Those of us who liked Allan Meltzer's history of the Federal Reserve were shocked when he showed up this summer as a Republican hack, writing:
[gopleader.gov]: There is no greater recognition of the failure of the stimulus program to create jobs than the efforts to mislead the public into [...]
Williams-Sonoma, on the other hand, managed to lose my business. After suffering a catastropic coffeemaker failure last night, I had tasked the Insta-Daughter to buy a new one. She was snubbed by the salespeople, who skipped her to wait on someone older who was behind her in line. So she went to [...]
I went. And apparently it's being sold as a Big Deal; here's the speech. Here are the points I was curious about last week:
Is this a real policy proposal, or a recital of Conservative failures? A healthy dose of the latter, and some generalities. No details, though. [...]
By all accounts, President Obama's visit to China last week was pretty much a failure on all the major issues, which include China's contributions to climate change, nuclear weapons, and various aspects of the world economy. I will concentrate my discussion on two of the most important and closely [...]
“Our conclusion is that if small firms aren’t captured well in the advance GDP data, the economy may be growing less quickly than suggested by the recent official data.”
-Jan Hatzius, Goldman Sachs economist
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This certainly comes as no surprise to us:
“The U.S. government is having a tough time guesstimating how many [...]
He watches the U.S. press corps cover Obama's trip to Asia, and judges it:
Manufactured failure #2: the press, Obama, Asia: I wasn't in touch with Howard French or Tish Durkin (to say nothing of Amb. Jon Huntsman) before we all expressed the same amazed and negative reaction at' [...]
It's not often that the internal Laval e-mail listserve grabs my attention. I guess I have to go, if only to satisfy my curiosity about the following points:
Is this a real policy proposal, or a recital of Conservative failures? Cap-and-trade, or a carbon tax? How much material can he cover in [...]
“Despite the spectacular failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, some economists insist that Fannie and Freddie need to be kept in place but somehow, just made safer. This optimistic advocacy—which assumes that Fannie and Freddie are like airplanes that need better landing gear—is in spite of the fact that [...]
Mark Gimein says that we shouldn't worry too much about the problem of too-big-to-fail, because the alternative to one big bank failing is lots of small banks failing:
What we've seen in virtually every crisis is that bank failures and other economic catastrophes are highly correlated, in large part because [...]
Governor Daniel K. Tarullo
At the Money Marketeers of New York University, New York, New York
November 9, 2009
Systemic crises typically reveal failures across the financial system. The crisis that unfolded over the past two years is no exception, [...]
