Now, if I really felt part of this thing, I'd sum up what I wrote yesterday by saying that if we want to reach many people in the 99 percent we claim to being concerned with, we need to address ourselves to their basic problems rather than to continually try to get them interested in our particular problems. That is, I wouldn't expect someone who ( Read more... )

Good piece by Steven Pearlstein from last December that's helping me understand Collateral Debt Obligations better. ("Better" here is a relative term, however. Still wouldn't say that I understand them.)

It's Not 1929, But It's The Biggest Mess SinceNow, to truly understand I would have to know what was going on in this paragraph (Pearlstein has ( Read more... )

"Repackaging dubious loans into collateralized debt obligations creates a lot of perfectly safe, AAA assets that will never go bad."

The sentence is from Paul Krugman's column in today's NY Times. He's using it as an example of sophistry (which his dictionary defines as "a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope ( Read more... )