Bailout and Financial Crisis News

1) Andrew Leigh: Permanent Income Inequality: Australia, Britain, Germany, and the United States Compared: This paper uses panel data from four developed nations to estimate permanent income inequality, measured by averaging equivalized household income across multiple years. In general, I find that permanent income inequality has followed similar trends to annual income inequality, rising particularly [...]

Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps? In today’s Washington Post, Jason Horowitz writes: Hotheaded Emanuel may be White House voice of reason: Rahm Emanuel is officially a Washington caricature. He’s the town’s resident leviathan, a bullying, bruising White House chief of staff who is a prime target for the failings of the Obama [...]

1) Sahil Kapur: Mitt Romney’s health care hypocrisy: On Real Time With Bill Maher last night, Financial Times editor Chrystia Freeland made the point (I’m not getting this word for word) that Republicans have every right to declare they oppose any kind of comprehensive health care reform and declare they aren’t interested in covering the [...]

By Jacob Goldstein Good morning. AIG lost $8.9 billion in the fourth quarter of last year. Sure, it sounds bad — until you compare it to the $61.7 billion the company lost in the fourth quarter of 2008. AIG’s main business lines actually turned a small profit in the last three months of 2009. But the [...]

According to the New York Times, Governor Paterson hired an ex-girlfriend into a high level position in one of the most important offices in his administration. Then his spokeswoman lied about their relationship. That’s at least part of the “bombshell” that the New York Times buried in the story it published today about Paterson. Most readers [...]

1) Arvind Subramanian: It is the poor who pay for the weak renminbi: Dani Rodrik of Harvard University estimates that China’s undervaluation has boosted its long-run growth rate by more than 2 per cent by allowing greater output of tradable goods, a sector that was the engine of growth and an escape route from underdevelopment [...]

1) Courtesy of Don the Libertarian Democrat, Adam Smith on Financial Regulation: To restrain private people, it may be said, from receiving in payment the promissory notes of a banker, for any sum whether great or small, when they themselves are willing to receive them, or to restrain a banker from issuing such notes, when all [...]

To hell with Japan, we have already had our lost decade — or at least so says the Washington Post. And, it was more than just the stock market that lost ground over the past 10 years: • Job growth was essentially zero; • Economic output (GDP) was weak. • Household net worth (inflation adjusted) fell as stock prices [...]

Many of the guys who defused the public outrage over AIG bonuses by promising to give back the money have turned out to be exactly as bad as you thought they were. Washington Post: As the final days of 2009 tick away, a majority of that money remains unpaid. Only about $19 million has been given [...]

by Sabrina Shankman, ProPublica - December 9, 2009 12:29 pm EST Today’s roundup of stimulus coverage: Most news today revolves around President Barack Obama’s stimulus speech on Tuesday and the announcement of a new jobs bill (or a second stimulus, stimulus 2.0, or 3.0, depending on who you read). In what Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson [...]

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