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TARP

How Many Parachutes?

Pick Your (Economic) Metaphor The real question is, now what? Government interventions are only meant to light a fire under the real economy and unleash what John Maynard Keynes called our “animal spirits.” But government dollars can’t sustain growth. Like it or not, the stock market is bigger than the Federal Reserve and the U.S....
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"Bank Runs," Circa 2009

No “Run on the Banks?” Define, “Run”It’s true that depositors haven’t raced to withdraw their money from the nation’s — indeed, the world’s — largest, so-called “money-center” banks the last 18 months or so (basically, the ones considered “too-big-to-fail”). That’s largely a credit, literally, to deposit insurance — administered in the U.S. by the FDIC....
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Birds and Dinosaurs

Credit Crunch Casualties: Publicly-Traded Builders While Washington is focused on rescuing the financial dinosaurs, outside of Wall Street, the future appears to belong to much smaller, sleeker, and more mobile organisms. Specifically . . . birds. Take the home construction industry. For the last 20 years or so, size conferred a huge advantage. Big, publicly-traded...
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