Promises, Promises
My piece on bank reform will have to delay until Monday evening. I am still working on it. Tonight’s piece is on entitlements and pensions globally and locally. I asked recently if anyone had data on other...
Read MoreAuthor: David Merkel
A Few Notes From the Fordham Conference
I will have a more comprehensive post tomorrow on my thoughts on bank regulation, but I will offer a few thoughts here. One thing I found interesting at the conference was what did not get much play in terms of what helped...
Read MoreAt the Fordham Conference: Time for a New Antitrust? False Assumptions
Carl Felsenfeld: Do we know what the problem is? What are we trying to solve? Antitrust does not deal with Citigroup/Travelers, it should deal with Bank of America/Fleet, Wells Fargo/Norwest. But it...
Read MoreAt the Fordham Conference: Creative Ideas for Limiting Bank Risk 2
Simon Johnson’s lunch talk was pretty standard: there is no social benefit to banks being larger than $100 billion in assets. Major banks are too politically powerful, but they should be fought the same way Teddy...
Read MoreAt the Fordham Conference: Creative Ideas for Limiting Bank Risk
Cornelius Hurley argues that banks are implicitly and explicitly subsidized, and that they need to return the subsidy. Dean Baker argues for a transfer tax, and weakening the political power of financial institutions. ...
Read MoreAt the Fordham Conference: Where We Are and How We Got There
First panel deals with James Kwak: Funding costs were overly low at the major banks. Alleges too big to fail, but big banks were highly rated. My experience is that small banks equally good as large banks have much...
Read MoreThe Rules, Part IV
Okay, here is tonight’s rule: Governments that scam the asset markets (and their citizens) take all manner of half measures to defend failed policies before undertaking structural reform. (This includes defending the...
Read MoreThe Rules, Part III
Okay, here is tonight’s rule: The assumption of normality for asset price changes is wrong in virtually every financial market setting. The proper distributions are fatter tailed and more negatively skewed. Normality...
Read MoreThe Rules, Part II
Before I start tonight, a reminder, those that want to follow me on Twitter can do so here. I will be sharing posts and ideas that I find insightful, that I might or might not share on the blog. I’m still...
Read MoreThe Rules, Part I
Dear readers, I am now on Twitter — AlephBlog is my moniker if you want to follow me. I have been somewhat reluctant to do this, but tonight’s post stems from a file on nonlinear dynamics on my computer that I...
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