I meant to publish this a couple of days ago. Warren Buffett commenting on the fact that Treasury Bills effectively pay no interest sent this email to his staff. “This should be bullish for Berkshire. With great foresight, I long ago entered the mattress business in a big way through our furniture operation. Now mattresses […]
Archive for December 13th, 2008
A Proposal To Trade The Payroll Tax For A Gas Tax
Greg Mankiw of Harvard is suggesting that as part of the fiscal stimulus plan the payroll tax be eliminated and the shortfall in revenue be made up through a gradual increase in gasoline taxes that would push the price up to $4 a gallon. For the wonkish among you there is a link to a […]
The Future Of Residential Mortgages-Maybe
Fools rush in should have been the title of this post. Everything I put down is probably not going to happen but let’s go ahead and speculate about the future of the U.S. mortgage industry. It’s kind of connect the dots and see where things might lead. The premise I’m starting with is that we […]
Obama Names New HUD Secretary
President-elect Obama used his Saturday radio address to announce his choice to head HUD and offered some thoughts on the housing crisis. Both his choice and his remarks are disappointing. The new head of HUD will be Shaun Donovan, currently the commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Prior to […]
A Dismal View Fiscal Stimulus
Naked Capitalism has quite a fine post dealing with an alternative view of the prospects for fiscal stimulus. It is pretty grim but certainly worth reading. Warning it is long and not an easy read. I won’t steal traffic from them by excerpting anything here, so follow the link above and try not to get […]
Madoff: Did Wall Street Look The Other Way?
Sometimes it’s an advantage not to be part of the Wall Street/New York clique. Today is certainly one of those rare times. The dodging, shifting, I saw it along time ago, of course we all knew what was going on nonsense that has eminated from the blogs and the papers with regard to the Ponzi […]