financial crisis

Still a little unclear how house flipping and sub-prime mortgages are linked to the Lehmann Brothers bankruptcy and Collateralized Debt Obligations? WallStats.com offers “A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis,” showing how low interest rates, the longstanding belief that housing values don’t decrease, and media hype — not to mention strikingly off-base quotes about the [...]

In this week’s edition of the Schultz Report audiocast, David Schultz examines the looming vote recount in the Minnesota US Senate face-off between Sen. Norm Coleman and Al Franken.

Is the situation here another Florida 2000 cage match, as so many pundits are claiming? In most respects, Schultz thinks the answer is no. But when it comes to the stakes and the political gamesmanship, that’s another matter.

Received this video over the weekend from a friend; according to Dailymotion, it was made by a 28-year-old in France, but the subject is entirely American.
Any further description would spoil the punchline, so we’ll just say… watch it.
The jobby trescourt

This Tuesday, on a day when the federal government announced it will pump a quarter-trillion dollars into our nation’s banks, four of Minnesota’s most prominent economists were by turns caustic and cautionary in their criticism of the federal response to changing financial markets and to the economic crisis that has spread across the globe over the past few weeks.

Yesterday afternoon I talked with MnIndy’s favorite business/economics journalist, Doug Henwood of the indispensable Left Business Observer, to see what he’s thinking about the economy and about the panic in credit markets, which so far seems unfazed by the bailout bill or by any of the other measures the Fed and the Treasury have undertaken. “Certainly the risk of something really nasty looks the highest it’s been since the end of World War II,” he tells MnIndy. “Now, if you want to draw some comfort from that, sometimes when people are thinking the world is coming to an end, that can be a sign that we’re close to the bottom. Or that we’re closer to the bottom than we are to the beginning.”

Everyone wondered whether, and how, John McCain’s charter membership in the “Keating Five” — a group of congressmen implicated in trying to foil government inquiries into Savings & Loan baron Charles Keating’s corner of the 1980s S&L scandals — would find its way into the 2008 campaign.
Wall Street answered that question for us. Now [...]

The following video (below jump) is an interview that Charlie Rose taped with Warren Buffett on Wednesday, shortly before the Senate vote on the bailout package.
Excerpt:
“In my adult lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever seen people as fearful economically as they are right now…. This is really an economic Pearl Harbor. That sounds melodramatic, and [...]

And retiring Minnesota Rep. Jim Ramstad is one of the House members cited in today’s NYT story who voted no the first time around but is more inclined to vote for this version. House leaders only need to change a dozen no votes to yes to secure passage of the measure, which failed by 23 [...]

Writing at the Sunlight Foundation’s website, Paul Blumenthal elaborates on the provisions that distinguish the Senate bailout package from the one that failed in the House:
An Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) patch, a mental health parity bill, a package of tax break extensions, and tax breaks and relief for victims of natural disasters, specifically Hurricane [...]

Barack Obama, speaking at a stopover in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, earlier today, gave his full-throated support to quick passage of the Wall Street bailout bill in the Senate after a different version was rejected Monday in the US House. The speech sought to bridge the gap between Wall Street’s wishes and those of the public not [...]