Today I had an English style breakfast (eggs, beans, mushroom, toast etc.,) at my hotel. Later ( Read more... )

When people ask me where I grew up, I usually say New York City. The actual part of NY is named Glendale, but most don't know where Glendale NY is. So to people familiar with New York, I usually say something like, "You know when you drive into Queens and see miles of cemeteries? That's where I grew up ( Read more... )

It seems to me that one of the main sources of the current crisis is a fundamental flaw in finance theory, relative to economic theory ( Read more... )

Cool - A colleague just informed me that I've got a wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Lewbel

The Boston Globe newspaper is apparently fond of me. See
http://www2.bc.edu/~lewbel/lewbel-globe-12012008.jpg
Most of the over a dozen other bell ringers who were there would probably have been better choices.

I hope the generation will soon be born that can't really understand why yesterday was historic.

It has become popular, at least among republicans and libertarians, to blame the subprime mess on government policies and regulations that encouraged homeownership and subprime mortgages. But this argument does not explain the timing of the financial meltdown. Policies to encourage low income mortgages have existed for decades. Fannie Mae (and its ( Read more... )

While I do know some economics, I'm not a macro or finance expert, and no one reads this blog anyway, but I still can't resist making a suggestion regarding the mortgage mess bailout: To minimize the ultimate cost to taxpayers, the government should demand equity shares from everyone it helps. In particular I would propose that ( Read more... )

Are the costs of the current financial crises unprecedented? No. The US gov't has now spent about the same amount of money in bailouts (fannie, freddy, bear sterns, and AIG) as it spent cleaning up the savings and loan mess in the previous era of financial deregulation. It has also been about the same amount as the cost of one year of the Iraq war.

http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/