Entries tagged "Panic of 2008"
Andrew Ross Sorkin's 'Too Big to Fail' is a big, ambitious book that tries to establish by sheer accumulation of detail and anecdote primacy to explain what exactly happened amid the crisis.
Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman asks a few questions in Thursday's Financial Times that are amazingly basic and unsettlingly unanswerable.
While the Chicken Littles in the mainstream media comb their archives for images of the Great Depression, an unlikely voice of reason emerges from Newsweek and Slate columnist Dan Gross who argues 2008 is not 1929. Gross, in fact, is downright irate over the issue, suggesting he'd like to throw Arthur Schlesinger's "The Coming of the New Deal" at the next person to make the comparison. Of course, if he does toss Schlesinger's three-volume set at someone, they should respond by throwing back Gross' own tome "Pop!: Why Bubbles are Great for the Economy," published in May 2007, just...
The Wall Street Journal piece Monday on the woes of Morgan Stanley right after the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. failure reveals a lot about the hellish tangle of unforeseen consequences of certain derivative instruments. It's another of a series of Journal pieces going back to Bear Stearns Cos. that really digs deeply into what really happened to these firms. This piece captures what this financial crisis -- increasingly dubbed the Panic of 2008 -- is all about: weird linkages that trigger mutually reinforcing feedback loops driven by fear. And on top of it all, there is the understandable, if...
