Tag: market liquidity

Flash Crash explained by HFT

The official report on events of October 15, 2014, is now public and it makes fascinating reading.  Most news accounts of the report have taken its bland no-smoking-gun conclusion at face value, but if you actually read the report a rather clear picture emerges, along with some rather obvious unanswered questions.  Bloomberg has the best […]

The bailouts of 2007-2009: the case of AIG

Now comes a symposium of five articles, published in the AEA outreach Journal of Economics Perspectives, several of which read clearly as a kind of apologia pro vita sua for the actions of the authors themselves.  The idea seems to be that, if only readers could be made to understand the conditions under which the […]

Financial Reform, Part One: TBTF

The word has come down, “Never again!” On October 14, 2008, the US Treasury announced a plan to recapitalize the US banking system, to the tune of $250 billion, starting with the nine biggest banks who were forced to take the money, whether they wanted to or not.  The government got its (our) money back, […]