Archives: October 2008

Not a Crisis of Confidence

Posted by: Michael Mandel on October 28, Categories: Growth

I have a new online story. Here's a piece of it: But what if the Bernanke-Paulson view is wrong? What if financial stress is a symptom, not a cause? What...

Credit Crunch or a Lack of Credit Demand?

Posted by: Michael Mandel on October 27, Categories: Financial markets

Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok suggests that the current problems are more the result of a lack of credit demand rather than the lack of credit supply. Just looking...

Video podcast on financial crisis

Posted by: Michael Mandel on October 27, Categories: Financial markets

Here is the first in a series of video podcasts I am doing on the causes of the financial crisis. The Real Cause of the Crisis...

An Interesting Trade Tidbit

Posted by: Michael Mandel on October 21, Categories: Trade

In 2000, Japan had a $42 billion trade surplus in motor vehicles and parts with the U.S. In 2007, Japan's motor vehicle trade surplus with the U.S. was a) $18...

Slow-growth world

Posted by: Michael Mandel on October 17, Categories: Growth

From my story this week: The bursting of the credit bubble suggests that the U.S. and global economies have a growth problem as well as a debt problem. According to...

Back in..partly

Posted by: Michael Mandel on October 17, Categories: Financial markets

In case anyone is interested, I moved some money out of money markets into the S&P 500 today. Not all the way back in...but part of the way. (My...

Paul Krugman wins the Nobel Prize

Posted by: Michael Mandel on October 13, Categories: Trade

Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economics today. Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has a very nice write-up about Krugman here, along with links. In the past, I have...

Iceland goes bankrupt

Posted by: Michael Mandel on October 10, Categories: Financial Crisis

That's an amazing sentence: Iceland goes bankrupt. But that's exactly what happened yesterday (see BW piece here. See NY Times piece here). That's a clear sign that the global financial...

Why Young Workers Might Benefit

Posted by: Michael Mandel on October 09, Categories: Demographics

As I've written quite a few times before, the post-2000 period has been a terrible time for young workers. Their wages were falling, and the price of assets such as...

My Current Investment Strategy...

Posted by: Michael Mandel on October 08, Categories: Financial markets

..if anyone is interested (as usual). I'm keeping my allocation roughly 50-50 between domestic and foreign equities on the one hand, and short-term money markets, Treasury bond funds and the...

Government spending as a stabilizing force

Posted by: Michael Mandel on October 07, Categories: Fiscal Policy

One big difference between now and the Great Depression is that government spending is far bigger as a share of the economy. This chart shows government spending--federal, state, and local--as...

The Great Repudiation?

Posted by: Michael Mandel on October 03, Categories: Political Economy

I just did a story for the magazine on the crisis. Is the U.S. heading for another Great Depression? Probably not—but we are about to go through a period future...

Misdiagnosis: Housing is not the Problem

Posted by: Michael Mandel on October 01, Categories: Financial markets

Paulson and Bernanke misdiagnosised the root of the current crisis. They identified the problem as the housing market, and nationalized Fannie and Freddie. But all they accomplished was establishing housing...

Why We need to expand deposit insurance

Posted by: Michael Mandel on October 01, Categories: Financial markets

My piece here. This should be the first thing that Congress does, even before passing a bailout package....