Tim Fernholz

I always thought it was funny when friends who worked in banking would refer to a risky bet on the market as a “huge position.” Now I’m less amused, but huge positions are exactly what the problem was in the market. A big reason that there are no longer any independent investment banks is that […]

Apparently realizing that it is Hugo Chavez Day here at TAPPED, John McCain’s campaign has released a new Spanish-language advertisement attempting to link Barack Obama to the Venezuelan leader. Chavez, you see, is one of the leaders that Obama would be willing to meet in his first year in office, which makes sense, since our […]

In a post yesterday, I referred to Hugo Chavez as a “dictator” and got some pushback from some commenters who said it was an unfair characterization. I don’t claim to be an expert on South America, so I went back and looked at the record to see what the story was, and basically would be […]

Now that the central issue of the campaign is the economy, Barack Obama has the momentum and is rising in the polls on the strength of his clear economic message and attacks on John McCain for his lobbyist-run campaign. McCain and his campaign haven’t helped out by offering a series of gaffes, and their credibility […]

The federal government is now planning to buy up distressed mortgages — the underlying cause of the current financial crisis — in “what could become the biggest bailout in United States history,” according to the Times. While no numbers were cited, it would likely be larger than the largest bailouts to date, so think in […]

In a made-for-D.C. story, a professor at Georgetown University announced this summer that he had enough support in the Malaysian parliament to return to that country and become Prime Minister. Anwar Ibrahim was the country’s finance minister in the nineteen nineties and led the country through a fiscal crisis before his political career was derailed […]

Adam sets ’em up, I knock ’em down. After John McCain’s gaffe yesterday he had basically two potential responses: Either admit that he didn’t know who Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero is, or pretend that his Spain policy is crazy. Apparently, he’s chosen the latter, as his campaign’s foreign-policy adviser Randy Sheunemann tells the […]

Adam Liptak has another fascinating article on the judicial system, this time concerning the declining number of times foreign courts have cited U.S. case law in their decisions. It’s a clever reversal of the well-worn debate about whether U.S. judges should be able to cite foreign case law here. The declining rates are taken as […]

I’ve said often enough that John McCain’s message of change and reform isn’t going to work because he can’t give a real example of what, exactly, those reforms entail. I’ve neglected McCain’s emphasis on vetoing earmarks because it’s nonsense, but this Politico article gives us all an opportunity to revisit the subject. The story makes […]