From MarketWatch: Ten large banks can return $68 billion in TARP Repay TARP: NTRS, BBT, MS, STT, JPM, USB, AXP, COF, GS, BNY It is a little confusing because Northern Trust (NTRS) wasn’t one of the 19 stress test banks. Name TARP Amount Repay Bank of America $52.5 billion No way! Citigroup $50 billion No way! JPMorgan Chase $25 billion XXX Wells Fargo $25 billion – GMAC $12.5 billion No way! Goldman Sachs $10 billion XXX Morgan Stanley $10 billion XXX PNC Financial Services $7.6 billion – U.S. Bancorp $6.6 billion XXX SunTrust $4.9 billion – Capital One Financial Corp.
From CNBC: Repeat Bank Stress Tests ‘Right Now’: TARP Panel Chair The Congressionally-appointed panel overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) recommends running again the stress tests on US banks, as economic conditions have worsened, its chair, Harvard University professor Elizabeth Warren, told CNBC Tuesday. “We actually make recommendations to do it all over again right now,” Warren told “Squawk Box.” “We’ve already blown past the worst-case scenario on unemployment,” she added. …
From the Fed : The 10 banking organizations required by the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program to bolster their capital buffers have all submitted capital plans that, if implemented, would provide sufficient capital to meet the required buffer under the assessment’s more-adverse scenario. As supervisors, we will be working with the institutions to ensure their plans are implemented quickly and effectively. Supervisors also continue to work with all regulated financial institutions to review the quality of their corporate-governance, risk-management and capital-planning processes
Mises’s memoirs are a unique source of inside information about the economics and politics of the first republic of Austria. They portray his professional life from about 1906 (the year he graduated with a doctorate in law from the University of Vienna) to 1940, stressing his activities in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, in World War I, in government, and in academia. He not only knew the intellectuals of his day; he had almost daily interaction with the political leaders of his country, with the higher echelons of the civil service, and with the executives of Austrian firms and business corporations
Riccardo Rebonato of the Royal Bank of Scotland and author of Plight of the Fortune Tellers talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the challenges of measuring risk and making decisions and creating regulation in the face of risk and uncertainty. Rebonato’s book, written before the crisis, argues that risk managers often overestimate the reliability of the measures they use to assess risk
My father defends the Ames Monument: UGLY!??! I’ll have you know that the Ames Monument contains within itself most of 19th Century American history — the railroad! crony capitalists! Manifest Destiny! New England duty! government extortion! congressional cynicism and betrayal! the industrial revolution! Victorian taste (it was designed by noted architect H.H. Richardson)! [Not to mention bas-reliefs by St. Gaudens]; irony (the UP moved the tracks and it now sits by itself in the middle of the lone prairie).
One of the things the news bureaus of the Washington Post must do before they can ever again become a great paper is to develop an enthusiastic ethos of publicly calling bulls— on the editorial page operations of the odious Fred Hiatt whenever possible. Ezra Klein takes a first step at Hiatt and company: Ezra Klein: Department of Corrections: Michael Gerson vs. the Health Industry : Michael Gerson’s column contains a pretty significant factual error.
Eugene Voiokh seriously dislikes the arguments of National Review “legal correspondent” Ed Whalen: The Volokh Conspiracy – Supreme Court Justices and “Policy Implications” : [T]alk [like Ed Whalen's] about how judges shouldn’t “make policy” has been commonplace now, especially on the Right…. [C]riticisms of… decisionmaking based on what seems to the judge to be likelier to produce good results are often correct….
By Edward Hugh: Barcelona The Latvian economy is certaily stuck in a hard and not especially pleasent place at the moment, and really one chart tells it all, since as we see above the local interbank overnight interest rates have been storming upwards and through the roof over the last two weeks. As a result of this unfortunate state of affairs the country has attained a higher profile in the international news media than most Latvians would ever have dreamt possible, or even, probably, considered desirable
Vladimir Putin forces an aluminum plant owner into humiliating public submission: When you think about the cram down the Obama people forced on the Chrysler bondholders in violation of U.S. bankruptcy law, or you recall the humiliation of the automakers driving economy cars cross country to testify before Congress, or if you recently watched a quavering and submissive Vikram Pandit — CEO of U.S. government owned Citi — on CNBC talking about the justified “retribution” of President Obama and his public supporters against freedom of contract on Wall Street, you have to think we really are not that far from a behind-closed doors version of the world which Putin now commands in Russia
The “two teeth for a tooth” view of punishment is espoused by Murray Rothbard (see ” Punishment and Proportionality ,” in Ethics of Liberty ) and Walter Block (see Toward a Libertarian Theory of Guilt and Punishment for the Crime of Statism and Radical Libertarianism: Applying Libertarian Principles to Dealing with the Unjust Government, Parts I & II ). Walter received a email recently from a Ukrainian software developer, Vladislav Gluhovsky , with a critique of this idea and some related thoughts. Mr.
The Wall Street Journal picks up my draft call for more fiscal expansion: Making the Case for Another Fiscal Stimulus : Although President Obama’s $787 billion fiscal stimulus is still working its way through the pipeiline, Berkeley economist — and former Clinton Treasury official — Brad Delong makes the case for another round. In a draft of a letter he says he may send Obama next week, he said: At the end of 2008, when your incoming administration was preparing your recession-fighting strategy, your forecasts were that the recession would bottom out in August of 2009, with a peak unemployment rate of 7.9%. The unemployment rate in May was already 9.4%.
From the WaPo: Bank Repayments May Exceed Estimate The Obama administration is set to announce next week that a larger-than-expected number of big financial firms can repay their bailout funds … The size of the repayments may double the initial estimate of $25 billion by the Treasury Department, the sources said. That would mean that many, perhaps nearly all, of the nine firms that regulators found to have sufficient reserves in a recent “stress test” would be allowed to return federal aid
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? At least this made me laugh and brightened my day: National Review: Brian Buetler snarks: National Review's Wise Latina Caricature Inexplicably Asian : [T]he folks over at the conservative National Review–apparently flummoxed by the very idea of a “wise Latina”–have caricaturized the Puerto Rican-descended Sonia Sotomayor as an Asian Buddhist
Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps? National Review: Brian Buetler: National Review’s Wise Latina Caricature Inexplicably Asian : As part of a cover package called “The Wise Latina,” the folks over at the conservative National Review–apparently flummoxed by the very idea of a “wise Latina”–have caricaturized the Puerto Rican-descended Sonia Sotomayor as an Asian Buddhist. Good times
The Maryland Chamber of Commerce today honored three outstanding small businesses and one non-profit organization during its annual Small Business of the Year Awards Luncheon at the BWI Airport Marriott Hotel. The awards program is designed to recognize the dedication, innovation and entrepreneurial spirit displayed by small businesses in Maryland. This year’s winners are: Small Business of the Year – 1-10 Employees Global Design Interactive is a full-service marketing communications firm that specializes in interactive multimedia.
“That Left Turn in ABQ” on BHO’s Cairo speech: The Speech : I was struck by the way Obama moved the Overton Window in this speech with regard to official US rhetoric in support of the Palestinians (has any US President ever described their plight as “intolerable” in a major speech, prior to today?) while… speaking very directly and forcefully against Holocaust denialism, using extreme positions on both sides against each other…. This is a theme which frequently arises in Obama’s speeches
First from Reuters: Fed’s Lockhart: Can’t wait too long to tighten (ht Alan) The Federal Reserve needs to be “anticipatory” and not wait too long to tighten monetary policy, Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart said in an interview published on Friday. … Lockhart is a voter on the Fed’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee, which meets June 23-24.
Michael Doyle writes: Sotomayor’s finances look a lot like the average person’s | McClatchy : Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor owns a condo valued at $1 million in New York’s Greenwich Village but otherwise is a woman of fairly modest means, a newly filed report shows. On Thursday, Sotomayor advised the Senate Judiciary Committee that she has savings of about $32,000 as well as $15,000 in credit card debt
This is Greenspan , the former head of the Fed, whose job it is to keep the entire banking system afloat despite its inherent bankruptcy: “Government guarantees of the liabilities of institutions viewed as too big to fail thwarts the competitive process that produces capital efficiency,Of all the regulatory challenges that have emerged out of this crisis, I view the [“too big to fail”} problem and the…precedents, now fresh in everyone’s mind, as the most threatening to market efficiency and our economic future.” These guys are usually better out of office than in. If we could just keep everyone out of office, we’d be good to go.
Download now or preview on posterous Posted via email from http://braddelong.posterous.com/slow-income-growth-and-absolute-poverty-in-th at Brad DeLong’s Scrapbook
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, uttered inconvenient truths to those who would manage the world’s economies in a startling plenitude that could be neither ignored nor validly denied. Her speech made the front page of Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. While blasting both the power wielded by the US Fed and the Bank of England and the directions in which they are wielding it, Merkel may not have uttered the ultimate truth the government is not fit to “manage” the money supply or the economy, still she has opened the debate the legitimacy of their powers in a way that only the head of the government of Europe’s largest economy could do
Note: some of the decline in occupancy rate is seasonal, and the rate should increase during the Summer months – especially since leisure travel has not declined as much as business travel and Summer has a higher mix of vacation travel (see: Hotels: “By the numbers” ) From HotelNewsNow.com: STR reports US performance for week ending 30 May 2009 In year-over-year measurements, the industry’s occupancy fell 10.2 percent to end the week at 51.6 percent.
Suppressing market interest rates to the lowest level possible seems to have become a key objective for central banks around the world as they respond to the turmoil in financial markets, the decline in output and the deterioration in the labor market.However, it is a fatal policy: it amounts to fighting the correction of the debacle which has been caused by central banks’ downward manipulation of interest rates through a relentless increase in bank circulation credit and the money supply. FULL ARTICLE
Paul Waldmann: Judicial Abstraction More Evidence That Girls Kick Ass at Math, Just Like Boys John Kay: Salutary lessons from the downfall of a carmaker Felix Salmon: Bernanke’s fiscal focus Google Book Search Settlement Agreement Matthew Yglesias: Google and Orphaned Works Larry Elliott: It’s a funny old game: where is the dream team of economists to tackle the slump? Steve Levitt: The Anti-Macroeconomics Roar Grows Louder Levey: I Had No Idea Sotomayor Smear Campaign Would Blow Up | TPMDC Paul Krugman on Robert Samuelson: The stagflation myth Paul Krugman: Feldstein on global warming
