May 29, 2009
Those naive financial journalists at The Atlantic are back! Andrew Gelman pointed me toward this misguided look at the latest auto bankruptcy (you know the one I mean). Key quote: Purists -- and virtually every academic economist one happens to encounter -- wonder what happened to the once inviolate principle of rewarding risk-takers. You'll have [...]
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March 24, 2009
George Soros has written an opinion in today's WSJ calling for the regulation - and elimination - of CDS. He notes that CDS are instruments which allow speculation on default: What makes [CDS] toxic is that such speculation can be self-validating. I find his nature-of-the-security argument severely lacking: The negative effect is reinforced by the [...]
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