Tea Bird

Exxon Mobil Posts Record Profit (Again)

Of course. We’re in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, but Exxon Mobil still pumps out the dough:

Exxon Mobil Corp. set a quarterly profit record for a U.S. company Thursday, surging past analyst estimates.
Exxon Mobil (XOM, Fortune 500), the leading U.S. oil company, said its third-quarter net profit was $14.83 billion, or [...]

Pittsburgh jobless rate drops in September

Some more good local economic news:

The Pittsburgh region added 7,000 new jobs year-over-year in September, and saw its unemployment rate drop to 5.4 percent, the state reported Tuesday.

Quote of the Day 9/21/08

For John McCain, it was a really bad week to have a bad week, and he had a bad week, with the comment about the fundamentals of the economy, which it took two days for him to be able to come back from that. … The economy’s been the number one on the issue list [...]

Quote of the Day 9/21/08

It is no stretch to say that after this week, the era of big government is back. To counter the most severe financial crisis since the great Depression, the federal government has become the world’s biggest insurance company. … This series of moves has put a stunning number of taxpayer dollars at risk — more [...]

Gall Street Indeed

It looks like bankrupt Lehman Brothers executives will walk away with billions in bonuses for running their company into the ground with risky leveraged bets.

N.Y. Post cover, “GALL STREET: Bonus billions for Lehman bigs.” That’s based on a rewrite of this story from The (London) Sunday Times — “Fury at $2.5bn Lehman bonus”: “STAFF at [...]

97% of Long Island Rail Road Employees Get Disability Payments

From the “Nice Work If You Can Get It Department” at the Times :

Virtually every career employee — as many as 97 percent in one recent year — applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement, a computer analysis of federal records by The New York Times has found. Since 2000, those records [...]

Bailout backlash builds

According to Avi Zenilman, both sides are beginning to balk at the bailout plan. And no wonder, we’ve been down the “trust me”/”no oversight” rabbit hole before with this administration.

As of Friday night, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke’s proposal to spend $700 billion of government money to buy up the bad debt that had infected [...]

No deal says Paul Krugman

From Krugman:

I hate to say this, but looking at the plan as leaked, I have to say no deal. Not unless Treasury explains, very clearly, why this is supposed to work, other than through having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets.
As I posted earlier today, it seems all too likely that a “fair [...]

A Professor and a Banker Bury Old Dogma on Markets

From the Times:

The Fed chairman and the Treasury secretary have cast aside long-held views about regulation and government involvement in private business.

McCain Health Care Deregulation

Ezra Klein on McCain’s health care deregulation plans:

Via Paul Krugman comes a great find. In the magazine Contingencies, published by the American Academy of Actuaries, John McCain has an article (pdf) on how he’d reform health care. It’s…surprising:
Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last [...]