OK, I said I wouldn’t give you any hints, but decided to pass one along anyway. Here are President Obama’s picks.
Author Archives: James_Hamilton
AIG outrage
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (hat tip: LA Times) asserted that on Friday insurance company AIG, recipient so far of perhaps $170 billion in bailout assistance, distributed over $160 million in “retention payments to members of its Financial Products Subsidiary.” These payments apparently included “retention” payments of over $1 million each to eleven individuals who are no longer working at AIG.
It’s tournament time!
I know, you’ve been regretting all year that you didn’t get a chance to enter the the 2008 NCAA Bracket Econbrowser Challenge. Well guess what? Here it is March of 2009 and you have a brand new chance!
What will recovery look like?
When good news comes, what should we expect to see?
Moral hazard and AIG
We are now suffering the consequences of one of the most spectacular financial miscalculations in history, after investors around the world discovered that trillions of dollars invested in securities derived from U.S. home mortgages were far riskier than they had originally believed.
Update on the auto sector
Detroit is still down, and the count begins on whether that means out.
How much is a trillion?
A trillion dollars used to be a sum that never naturally came up in normal conversation. Now all of a sudden, it’s the standard unit we seem to be using to talk about our economic problems and what we’re trying to do about them. Fortunately, I think I finally got a handle on what $1 trillion really means.
Stock prices and fundamentals
How low can stock prices go, and how worried should you be?
The Bernanke rally
Tuesday’s stock market rally was pretty impressive. But can the mere words of the Federal Reserve Chair actually produce a 4% increase in the value of the U.S. capital stock?
Deflation risk down but not out
While this week brought some pretty frightening numbers on industrial production and manufacturing surveys, I viewed Friday’s CPI release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics as slightly encouraging.