Economix Blog: Weekend Business Podcast: Mortgage Crisis, the Euro and the Fed

The subprime mortgage crisis dominated the Weekend Business podcast when it started in 2007.

This is the podcast’s last waltz. We’re ending this series of weekly podcasts much as we started — with Gretchen Morgenson’s coverage of that crisis and its continuing consequences for homeowners, banks, the broader financial system and the overall economy. She covers this subject in her column in Sunday Business.

I also talked with Floyd Norris about the crisis in the euro zone. The European Central Bank has begun offering large-scale low-cost loans to European banks, easing the severity of their short-term liquidity problems. That may give leaders of the European Union some breathing room as they grapple with the fiscal and governance issues that threaten the Continent.

The euro crisis is likely to spill over to banks in the United States in the months ahead, in the view of Tyler Cowen, the George Mason economist, with whom I chatted in a third conversation on the podcast.

While American financial regulations are not yet adequate for the trials ahead, he says, the Federal Reserve has required financial institutions to maintain enormous reserves at the central bank. This is likely to provide an important buffer in 2012, he writes in the Economic View column in Sunday Business.

You can find specific segments of the podcast at these junctures: Gretchen Morgenson (31:10); Floyd Norris (17:33); Tyler Cowen (7:51).

As articles discussed in the podcast are published, links will be added to this post.

You can download the program from The New York Times’s podcast page or directly from iTunes.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3a2af2d0f4bfecbf1d6544cc54bb8128