Author Archive | Jim Lindgren

Via ACSBlog comes this disturbing story suggesting Ohio’s e-voting machines may generate paper time-stamped paper trails that could enable election workers to determine who voted for which candidate.

Albany law professor Patricia Salkin has a new blog on zoning and land-use law, Law of the Land. Check it out.

CNN is broadcasting a mini-series on “fundamentalism”: Jewish, Muslim and Christian. While these forms of fundamentalism have a few things in common, the dissimilarities are so stark that carelessly juxtaposing them tends to create a false sense of similarity. Both academics and journalists sometimes depict Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. as particularly dangerous people, but […]

At about 8:15 ET Friday morning, the Federal Reserve reduced the discount window rate, which was 6.25% (a 1% penalty over the stated 5.25% Fed Funds rate) to 5.75% (a .5% penalty) for borrowing at the discount window. The most heartening thing about it is the reversal in worrying much more about the economy: Financial […]

I confess to being puzzled by the Federal Reserve’s actions in recent weeks, as well as by the assumptions of even most of the Fed’s public critics that we are not likely to go into a recession. Without an economics degree, I may well be misunderstanding the evidence or the Fed’s duties. I had begun […]

In Part I of this morning’s posts on the Federal Reserve, I pointed out that, since World War II, significant housing price drops have always been followed by recessions or been coincident with them. The Federal Reserve’s initial response to the subprime mortgage crisis was to claim last spring that it seemed likely to be […]

Federal Reserve heavyweight Bill Poole gave an interview to Bloomberg: William Poole, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said there’s no sign that the subprime-mortgage rout is harming the broader U.S. economy, and an interest-rate cut isn’t yet needed. “I don’t see any impact as yet on the real economy or on […]

In 2002, before he was named Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke gave an interesting talk on the dangers of deflation: With inflation rates now quite low in the United States, however, some have expressed concern that we may soon face a new problem–the danger of deflation, or falling prices. That this concern is not purely […]

For the third time today, the Federal Reserve has intervened to provide liquidity to banks at its discount window. After the second intervention, CNBC reported that the size of the Fed’s two interventions was larger than in any day since September 2001. The third intervention was a very small addition ($3 billion) to the other […]

Among the many hedge funds disclosing recent losses is the main one run by Renaissance Technologies. Jim Simons, the spectacularly successful hedge fund manager of Renaissance, just reported that his main hedge fund has lost 8.7% so far in August. Nonetheless, in a letter to investors, he claims that “The culprit is not our Basic […]

According to the Wall Street Journal, two Goldman Sachs hedge funds are having trouble. The first of these revelations on Thursday seemed to trigger an acceleration of the market slide that began in Europe. Apparently, the computer models that had proved so successful over the last few years caused large trading losses in the last […]

Today the New York Stock Exchange had its biggest volume day ever, trading 2.8 billion shares. As the US Stock market neared the end of another big down day (down 2.8%, 387 points on the Dow), here are some of the headlines on the stories at Yahoo Finance: Dow Plunges [Over] 300 on Mortgage Concerns […]

According to final figures on Friday, the S&P 500 ended down 2.66%, edging out last Thursday’s 2.64% drop for the second worst day in the S&P 500 since early 2003. The NASDAQ was down 2.51%; the Dow was down “only” 2.09%. That means that for the year the S&P 500 is up only 1%, while […]

On CNBC at 2:46pm ET, Jim Cramer is screaming about the Fed right now: “WE HAVE ARMAGEDDON!” UPDATE (2:56pm): While I was writing a very long post suggesting in a quiet and indirect way that I can’t understand why the Fed is not providing credit to the market, Jim Cramer on CNBC’s “Stop Trading” segment […]

The Wall Street Journal is today reporting that Wells Fargo, a major mortgage lender, is raising the interest it charges on prime jumbo home mortgages by a whopping 1.125%. The Cerberus deal to buy Chrysler went through today, but they were unable to sell the corporate debt to fund the deal at prices that they […]