Bailout and Financial Crisis News

From a Washington Post article on proposed legislation to regulate overdraft fees: “Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) said he avoided overdraft fees with a credit line and asked if many of the problems could be eased with consumer education.” Good on you, Spencer. You have a credit line — which many of your constituents can’t get — and you have it linked to your checking account — which many of your constituents wouldn’t even know how to ask for.

By lending the banks money at zero interest rates, the FT’s Martin Wolf says, the Fed is helping the banks recapitalize themselves. The banks aren’t lending because they’re still trying to recover from all the lousy loans they made three years ago (and because there aren’t all that many folks to lend to). So there’s nothing else to do with the money other than hoard it, buy safe Treasuries, and pay huge bonuses. It’s annoying to watch banks that would have collapsed a year ago now minting money at taxpayer expense. But that’s the way monetary stimulus always works.

We use detailed information about wages, education and occupations to shed light on the evolution of the U.S. financial sector over the past century. We uncover a set of new, interrelated stylized facts: financial jobs were relatively skill intensive, complex, and highly paid until the 1930s and after the 1980s, but not in the interim period. We investigate the determinants of this evolution and find that financial deregulation and corporate activities linked to IPOs and credit risk increase the demand for skills in financial jobs. Computers and information technology play a more limited role. Our analysis also shows that wages in finance were excessively high around 1930 and from the mid 1990s until 2006. For the recent period we estimate that rents accounted for 30% to 50% of the wage differential between the financial sector and the rest of the private sector.

Dede Scozzafava’s exit from a New York House race is just the latest example of the new Republican Party’s hostility to pro-choice women. Linda Hirshman on why Sarah Palin is a club of one.

I’ve always assumed, wrongly it appears, that [libertarians] would argue that the slaves could never be the least cost avoider. But I stand corrected. I learned in the debate that they would bite the bullet and accept slavery and genocide…