Ward on Words

Apparently the fabulous profits "earned" by Goldman Sachs this quarter aren't quite enough for the investment banking firm. According to this story by Allan Sloan in the Washington Post, they're haggling with Treasury over the price of the stock purchase warrants it gave the feds last fall. Not in the economic biz, so I'll let Sloan explain the warrants: "The warrants are very valuable, especially with the recent sharp run-up in Goldman's stock price. The warrants carry the right (but not the obligation) to buy 12.2 million Goldman shares at $122.90 each. Goldman's closing price of $160.03 on Monday put the warrants "in the money" by a bit more than $450 million. (That's the $37.13 difference between $160.03 and $122.90, multiplied by 12.2 million.) Given that the warrants still have more than nine years to run, they're clearly worth more than $450 million because their owner has years of upside. However, because there'...

"Economy Made Few gains in Bush Years" is a headline from today's Washington Post. According to the story by Neil Irwin and Dan Eggan, the nation's first president with an MBA (from Harvard, to boot!) "has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades." The story is filled with gloomy statements that define the Bush era as "as a time of little progress on the nation's thorniest fiscal challenges," and as a period that showed "...the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago." The Bush team, with characteristic bravado, claimed pride in their economic accomplishments. Here's what Edward P. Lazear, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, is quoted in the article as having recently said: "It does look like a great eight years, aside from the last quarter, unfortunately. In the long term, things look good. The reason things look good...