Tag: mortgage

Bailout MetaRoundup & Alternatives

MetaRoundup:

Several of the economics blogs I read have had useful roundups of bailout commentary. A few I find found useful:

Do we need to act now? on Economist’s View

9/26 Links on Economist’s View

NYT Economix’ analyst roundup

Greg Mankiw’s roundup of commentary

Update 9/29:

Real Time Economics’ Secondary Sources

Update 10/1: 

Greg Mankiw with more commentary

Alternative Plans:

Economists Against the Paulson Plan

Brad de Long on Krugman on the Dodd plan

WSJ Real Time Economics’ Text of Lawmakers’ Agreement on Principles

Thomas Palley on Saving the Financial System

Marginal Revolution on the Republican plan to rescue mortgages instead of buying mortgage assets

Marginal Revolution with a Modest Proposal (finding and isolating toxic assets)

Update 9/27:

Marginal Revolution with substitute bridges

Greg Mankiw with a letter from Robert Shimer with a nice analysis, including problems with Paulson, the lemons problem, and the Diamond, Kaplan, Kashyap, Rajan & Thaler fix

Update 9/28:

Real Time Economics on securitization

Brad deLong on nationalization (the Swedish model)

Update 9/29:

The Big Picture with Stop Targeting Asset Prices

Marginal Revolution asks, is the Sweden plan better?

Bailout without Representation

The NYT has the draft text and an explanation of the Bush administration’s $700 billion bailout proposal. It audaciously creates a budget authority almost as big as the federal government’s total discretionary spending and bigger than every on-budget agency, seven times the California state budget, without any checks and balances at all:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

We used to dump tea in harbors for things like this.

A New Method of Macarony Making, As Practiced at Boston

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