News
Bloomberg | Cheap Money Era That Saved U.S. Housing Seen Bottoming
The era of increasingly cheap money that fueled the housing recovery and record home-lending profits is showing signs of ending in the mortgage bond market.
CNN Money | Bank of America in $10 billion settlement with Fannie Mae
Bank of America has reached a $10.3 billion settlement with Fannie Mae to deal with questionable home loans it sold to the government-backed mortgage financer during the housing bubble.
WSJ | Debating Whether Economy's Best Years Are Behind It
After three years of anemic growth, the U.S. economy is confronting the nagging question of whether its best years are behind it.
Bloomberg | Tarullo Sees Big Banks With Fed Rule Protecting Taxpayer
Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarullo is pushing an agenda to regulate banks beyond the restraints in the Dodd-Frank Act, including making them fund more of their assets using long-term borrowing.
Econ Comments & Analysis
Washington Post | If we can’t kill farm subsidies, what can we kill?
Symbolic of the debate we’re not having about government’s size and role — the essence of the deficit problem — is the future of farm subsidies. Running $10 billion to $15 billion annually, they don’t do much good.
Barrons | Washington's Next Big Fight
Enjoy the brief calm before the next political hullabaloo. Full-throated resumption of the deficit feud between Capitol Hill Republicans and Democrats will occur on the night of President Barack Obama's State of the Union address, likely during the first week in February.
Market Watch | Prepare for zero real growth in the U.S. in 2013
The fiscal-cliff deal — the tax half of the deal anyway — is now past us, and the reflation trade continues along. However, what we now see, which the very scary Paul Farrell pointed out this week, is a number of very strong headwinds developing for 2013 and 2014.
Mercatus | 10 Ways Dodd-Frank Will Hurt the Economy in 2013
The fiscal cliff deal painfully hammered out in the waning hours of 2012 likely foreshadows the battles yet to come this year over the country's fundamental mismatch between revenue and spending. But these fiscal fights are not the only reason 2013 promises to be interesting.
CATO | To Expand Commerce and Grow the Economy, Trade Freely with Europe
Recessions bring out the worst in people. The search for economic scapegoats almost always turns to trade. People want to pull up the drawbridge to imports, further reducing growth around the world.
Blogs
Library of Economics | Murphy on Fiscal Austerity and Higher Tax Rates
As these quotations from [Paul] Krugman and [Christina] Romer illustrate, many of today's proponents of Keynesian policy do not simply disagree with their critics, but go further by leading the general public to believe that only the Keynesians have scientific research on their side.
Market Watch | Why the next U.S. downgrade will really matter
RBC Capital Markets is calling it: the U.S. is going to lose its triple-A rating from another rating agency. And this one may matter more because it would affect how investors have to look at the government’s debt.
WSJ | Banks Are Still Too Big and Fragile, Economist Says
What a difference a few years makes. Or not, in the case of banking regulation, says Anat Admati, a Stanford University economist who studies banks and finance.
