Not So Fast on Mortgage Solutions

A drumbeat is building for some form of federal takeover of troubled home mortgages. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) is leading the charge in the Congress, while Bank of America has been lobbying hard behind the scenes. Respected economists like Paul R. Krugman and Alan S. Blinder, both of Princeton, More…

Wall Street as Black Hole

Stock markets rebounded mightily yesterday, dazzled by yet more center-stage virtuoso turns by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. Over the weekend, he out-Greenspanned Greenspan by engineering a takeover of Bear Stearns, and then opened the Fed’s resources to investment banks in addition to the commercial banks that are its More…

Bailout Bernanke: Hero of Wall Street

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke may be running for a “Hero of Wall Street” award. Over the last few months, he has opened up the Fed’s coffers for banks and brokerages to the tune of hundreds of billions, and is accepting riskier loan collateral than ever before. Last week, More…

Imploding Credit Bubble to Hit $1 Trillion

The current credit and financial crisis, unusually, is almost entirely the creation of the financial services industry.

Financial services now dominates American business to an astonishing degree. Though the industry accounted for only about 16 percent of corporate output in 2007, it racked up more than More…

Credit Crisis Only Begins With Mortgages

One can pity Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. No other federal reserve chairman ever cut interest rates by a full 1.25% within just eight days, as Bernanke has done. But the monetary skies remain as leaden and thunder-clouded as ever. The stock market keeps quivering downward, crowds thin at More…