Archive for June, 2009

From the CBO’s June update on TARP funds (that’s a .pdf): The market value of outstanding warrants held by the Treasury is around $6 billion, CBO estimates.14 Of the total, about $1 billion is from warrants issued by the 10 banks that recently repaid their TARP funds. However, those calculations are sensitive to the assumptions...
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I’m not an expert on political change. But this article in the NYT claiming that “even as cultural acceptance of homosexuality increases across the country, the politics of gay rights remains full of crosscurrents” strikes me as insane, for two reason. First, that someone could be short-sighted enough to think that a decade of...
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I love that when Cap & Trade was introduced in the 1990s, Democrats and environmentalists derided it as putting a price on the environment and capitulating to business. Republicans pushed it as a market-based solution to a social problem. Now, Democrats and environmentalists embrace C&T as the greenest thing around (well, other than...
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Looks like Goldman Sachs is going to be making record bonus payments on the year. Let’s take a stroll, shall we?: Under then-head Jon Corzine (the soon-to-be-ex-governor of NJ), Goldman fucked over LTCM when they were going bankrupt in the late-1990s. From Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed: “In Greenwich, Goldman’s sleuths, who had the...
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Interesting to note that once you claim to be holding an ‘election’, or that your country is a ‘democracy’, it makes it possible to put you on the hook for things you wouldn’t normally want to be on the hook for. So, Iran is now making ‘reluctant concessions’ with regard to the farce of election...
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This article doesn’t make clear enough the fact that ALL major Wall Street banks continue to have billions of dollars of federal assistance. Set the pay for giving money to AIG but not for Goldman Sachs, despite the fact that the money went directly from AIG to Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs books profits because...
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This week, we find out that 10 banks are returning TARP money. Or more specifically, 10 banks are repaying $68.3 billion in federal bailout money. This does not mean that these banks are freeing themselves from the yoke of government (only, says the snark in me, it allows them to pay themselves obscene amounts...
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My partner and I have been talking a lot about non-profits of late, and some of the thinking about expertise that came out of these discussions is possibly worth sharing (at least to the extent that anything really is on the intertubes). I want to give credit to partner without assigning blame for my...
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On the subject of memory again, I am afraid of needles. Needles of all kinds, but shots and blood-drawing in particular. Apparently, I was fine with shots until about the age of six. But while it’s tempting to attribute to my mother’s passing (doctors! trauma! death!), here I think it is not the...
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A few month ago, a meme went around on Facebook to say 25 things about yourself. I thought it might be interesting to do them a bit more fleshed out than the FB venue allows for. I might not get to 25, I might do more. Thing One: my mom died when I was...
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