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Harvard's Ed Glaeser, also a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, and Wharton's Joseph Gyourko have an (free registration required) of the likely futility of proposed government efforts to stop the slide in housing prices. The profs specifically Read More

Even as states and municipalities face unprecedented capital-markets pressure as they try to issue new debt, Standard and Poor's currenty has no states on ratings-watch negative, or even with a negative outlook. Read More

From my presentation at yesterday's Manhattan Institute "Market Meltdown" conference, a chart depicting the 10-year trend in public pension fund contributions by New York State and City taxpayers: Pension contributions over the past eight years ha Read More

From Stephen Green, chairman of London-based HSBC, the world's largest bank: "I believe the direction is clear: regional capital markets will develop and more of the capital generated in the fast-growing emerging markets will stay closer to home on t Read More

At a Crain's breakfast this morning, City Comptroller (and 2009 mayoral candidate) Bill Thompson acknowledged a vital truth. "Budget growth has lately been out of balance with the growth of our local economy. Had we started to tie city spending to [ Read More

As suspected and reported anecdotally, municipal-bond issuance fell off the charts in September and October. Municipal Market Advisors, in its weekly outlook today, notes that such bond issuance was 54 percent below last year's levels for September a Read More

With the city comptroller's office now a loss of 35,000 jobs in New York-based investment banking and other financial services occupations, what's the next thing that will drive profits and employment in a Wall Street recovery?  In a recent "On th Read More

As everyone rushes to conclude that America's financial-regulatory regime is completely broken, the FT has  to say (registration required) about hedge funds whose UK-based assets -- estimated at $65 billion dollars -- were frozen in the Lehma Read More

The Wall Street Journal considers the Bloomberg fiscal record, in an op-ed called The money quote after the jump: Read More

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association released its c of Wall Street's second-quarter results today. It found that for the quarter, which ended in June, US-based broker-dealers eked out a pre-tax profit of $4.8 billion, after three Read More

The possibility of increasing the city's resident personal income tax was broached by Council Speaker Christine Quinn in her before the Citizens Budget Commission yesterday. Today's Times on the subject includes some comparisons of the Read More

Update: The Times reports that the MTA put off a planned debt issue Tuesday because of the still-inhospitable capital markets. Ohio and Hawaii did the same. The good news is that despite increasing pressure on both revenues and Read More