Category: Money

The bailout has failed for now. Of course they will try again after Rosh Hashanah, so this is by no means over. But let’s think about what will happen if nothing gets passed. Not that I know what I’m talking about. What pushed Paulson and Bernanke to seek the bailout was the freezing up of…

The root cause of the troubles in the financial system is the severe decline in housing prices. Financial companies bet that this would not happen. So how about, instead of bailing out the financial companies by buying their bad mortgages, we bail out the homeowners by buying their houses? The government would buy houses for…

How is the big bail out supposed to work? The basic idea seems to be that the U.S. government will pay bad financial assets. Once these have been purchased, financial companies will know how much money they have. Right now, nobody will lend money, because they don’t know how much they should keep in reserve.…

The U.S. government has just now moved to bail out A.I.G. In this case it may not be a pure bailout: the government issued an $85 billion loan in return for warrants for 80% of the company. To put $85 billion in perspective, it’s the cost of the was in Iraq for eight months. So…

Display ads on the web seem to be in something of an arms race (display ads are like the ones on the right side of this post; they are not the same as search ads, which you see when you do a web search). People browsing the web get better and better at ignoring display…