thegipples

Additionally, 16% of Americans see the internet as a change for the worse.

From the page: ""We could hire any middle-tier guy or gal at Goldman, and they would tell us within 15 seconds that the deal we have made as a nation with Goldman is underpriced by many, many orders of magnitude and that we are insane." "

Did people really used to pay to read about what's going to be on television? Did people really used to watch television? Fascinating.

From the page: "Instead of paying unemployment benefits to workers who have lost their jobs, it pays companies to keep workers on payroll, but working reduced hours. In a typical case, a company may reduce hours by 20 percent. The government picks up 60 percent of the lost wages that would be implied by this cut. The company picks up 20 percent, and the worker incurs a loss of 20 percent of this 20 percent, or 4 percent. This means that a worker may work 4 days a week rather than 5, and get a 4 percent reduction in their take home pay; probably not a bad deal in most workers' eyes.

In short, there is a simple mechanism to reduce the misery associated with the downturn, if those who make economic policy are prepared to take it."

From the page: "If Fannie and Freddie incurred large losses on mortgages purchased subsequent to their takeover, it would imply that they overpaid banks for these mortgages. Whether or not this was a deliberate policy, it means that Fannie and Freddie were subsidizing the banks in much the same way as TARP was supposed to do when the plan was initially proposed to Congress."