As yesterday’s column mentions, bailout backlash is one risk that General Motors faces. Some of its most loyal customers, the buy-America crowd, may be so angry about the government bailout that they’ll shop for a Ford or perhaps even a foreign brand.…

After a few days off, I’m still trying to catch up with all the commentary about the AIG bonuses. Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times attracted many negative comments after saying that the government should honor employees’ contracts. Here’s…

A trillion dollars used to be an almost unimaginable sum. For most people, it still is, but we’re seeing that figure more often in reports about the federal budget deficit, the cost of the bank bailout and so on.

James Hamilton at…

As I wrote in Sunday’s column, the country’s mood has turned Puritanical when it comes to travel by bailed-out bankers. The U.S. Travel Association has responded with a series of news releases, reminding Congress that jobs are at stake and decrying…

The stock market gave a big thumbs-down today to Timothy Geithner’s revamped bank-bailout plan. Douglas Elliott, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, isn’t a big fan of the bailout either.

Specifically, he doesn’t like the “bad bank” that would use…

Update: See this followup post for more information.

The rental-car industry may be next in line for a federal bailout, the Wall Street Journal reports today.  Enterprise, Hertz and their competitors want help financing their new-car purchases, and they apparently…

My colleagues and I have been joking about the need for a newspaper bailout, but the French, it seems, are way ahead of us. The Associated Press reports:

The French state will help provide free newspaper subscriptions to teenagers for their 18th…

If you need to know the date that Lehman Brothers or Washington Mutual failed, or if you’re simply trying to figure out how we got into such a mess, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has a website for…

Count Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-prize-winning economist, among the commentators who think troubled U.S. carmakers need to go through Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Stiglitz wrote in the Financial Times recently:

The US car industry will not be shut down, but it does need to…

In a case of life imitating Saturday Night Live, at least two of the three Detroit auto CEOs intend to drive to Washington for their return engagement. The SNL jokesters aren’t the only folks having fun at Detroit’s expense, either. Antony…