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Meanwhile, a group of economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston had been noticing the same thing. "We were trying to understand why these numbers looked the way they did," says Burcu Duygan-Bump. Partly because of conversations the economists had with Fed staffers in the banking supervision division, the group came to believe the aggregate data was obscuring the underlying dynamics of the financial system. "If you say New England has a snowstorm with an average snowfall of two inches, that might not reflect the fact that Boston got ten inches and northern Maine got none," says Ethan...
...about the same time as the Boston Fed piece came out, two finance professors at Harvard Business School, David Scharfstein and Victoria Ivashina, wrote a paper called "Bank Lending During the Financial Crisis of 2008." Scharfstein and Ivashina focused in on a database of new loans made to large corporations and documented a 36% drop during August-October 2008, as compared with the three months prior. They, too, argued that drawn-downs were artificially inflating overall lending figures. Yes, there was lending, but it was involuntary, and often to struggling companies - like GM and Tribune - that banks might not otherwise...
...share that information," he says. "They've been remarkably unforthcoming about the rationale for their interventions." That seems to be a common sentiment. "The one thing they emphasize that we really agree with is they want policymakers to share more data that underlie their decisions," says the Boston Fed's Duygan-Bump. As a new Administration takes office and the process of spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fix the economy continues, it will be as important as ever to question whether the policy responses we come up with are the right ones - to make sure not only that...
...rather, is the burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes, urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union." According to Max Blumenthal, who published a recent article on the topic, the trope's persistent popularity is fed by financial opportunism: "The Christmas kulturkampf is a growth industry in a shrinking economy, providing an effective boost for conservative fundraising and a ratings bonanza for right-wing media." O'Reilly himself has lent credence to this theory. "Every company in America should be on its knees thanking Jesus for being...
...affable, debonair fellow named Stanley Chais, who ran the Brighton and Popham investment groups for decades. We were in two sub-groups of Brighton, and they were small, 10 to 15 people - possibly so they would fly under regulator radar, victims now tell me. Brighton, it turns out, fed the money into Madoff. I'd sit next to Stanley at year-end holiday parties and, knowing my family's money was in his hands, I'd ask: "How're things going with the arbitrage?" The answer was always, "Life is good." Things have changed...