California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appears to be heading back to the drawing board in order to come up with some plan to see the state through its cash crunch. The Governator had been making the rounds in Washington this week but evidently came away empty handed. After the resounding defeat of the various initiatives that […]
Archive for May 21st, 2009
The Day Before Friday Failures
Jumping the gun, the FDIC seized Bank United today and sold it to a consortium of private equity buyers. As you all know they agency usually waits until the close of business on Friday to take over a bank. This is probably going to be controversial. Not because they closed down the bank — it […]
Investor Interest Evidently High In Foreclosed Homes
A couple of days ago I did a post about existing home sales. At the end of it I posed a couple questions about the market and particularly about the near frenzy in some of the hard hit areas for foreclosed homes. I was mostly thinking out loud. As it happens, the WSJ had a […]
Why The Administration Wants To Nationalize Student Loans
The Obama administration made it pretty clear yesterday that they do indeed intend to take over the student loan market. That’s not a big surprise but the language they used to make their case was revealing. Robert Shireman, a deputy undersecretary of the Department of Education had this to say to the House Education and […]
Unemployment Claims And Other Assorted Bits Of Data
Here’s some quick economic data. New claims for unemployment benefits last week dropped to 631,000 from 643,000 the week before. The four week moving average fell from 632,000 to 628,500. No reason to break out the good champagne on those numbers. Here’s the summary of the Philly Fed’s monthly survey: According to respondents to the […]