Representative John Tierney of Massachusetts is one of those politicians whose questions tend to be substantially longer than the answers they elicit. But that doesn’t mean the questions, pared to their essence, aren’t good ones. Here he is grilling FHFA head Ed DeMarco, asking why he’s refusing to consider principal reductions on mortgages.

DeMarco’s answers come at 2:15 and 4:50. He starts off quite explicitly:

We have been through the analytics of the underwater borrowers at Fannie and Freddie, and looked at the foreclosure alternative programs that are available, and we have concluded that the use of principal reduction within the context of a loan modification is not going to be the least-cost approach for the taxpayer.

Later on, he agrees to furnish Congress with these analytics: I, for one, would love to see them.

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I got some very smart responses to my post about statistics in Ontario, none more so than from Reihan Salam. Picking up on my chart of median household income in Ontario and New York, Reihan responds by saying that, essentially, that particular game is rigged: Ontario has more married-couple households, even if it doesn’t have bigger households, and that will help explain at least some of the difference.

I think that Reihan’s right here, although I suspect that even if you adjust for household size, median incomes in Ontario are still going to be higher than in New York. But Reihan’s argument is essentially a subset of a bigger fact, which is that it’s never possible to make true apples-to-apples comparisons between two different states or countries — especially if you take into account things like “the particular historical challenges facing a post-slavery society”.

This is simply a basic fact of statistical analysis: making comparisons across time is a lot easier than making comparisons across space. So measuring GDP growth, for instance, is actually easier than measuring GDP, which is surprisingly difficult.

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An audit says that it’s nearly even money the FHA runs out of cash next year — WSJ

Struggling cities are paying more and more to ratings agencies — Bloomberg

Gingrich called Freddie Mac “insane,” was later paid $300K to lobby for them — Bloomberg

70% of the top 1% have been employed by their father’s firm — milescorak

Even Glenn Hubbard is calling for “radical change” — Washington Post

Even as one of their reporters is arrested by the NYPD, the Daily News says “Bravo” to Bloomberg’s eviction of Occupy Wall Street — NYDN

Short sellers are “waiting and watching” for a chance to all make a killing on Groupon — Reuters

And Netflix takes up 32.

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I spent this morning at the release of the tenth annual report on “Prospects for Ontarios prosperity” — you’re jealous, I know. Ontario, if you read the report, is in pretty bad shape, when compared to its peers.

The general theme of the report is that the way to fix this situation is to improve Ontario’s performance when it comes to productivity and innovation; there was a general consensus in the room that Ontario wasn’t nearly productive or innovative enough, and that this was a big problem.

So, being a bit contrarian, I decided to push back. The first thing I did was point out that the chart above is rather misleading: there’s a very good reason why the two Canadian provinces are at the bottom of the league table. All numbers have been converted using “2010 PPP”, under which one US dollar is worth 1.

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I’m glad I found myself in Toronto this evening, because tonight’s Munk Debate was illuminating and enjoyable. The motion was that “North America faces a Japan-style era of high unemployment and slow growth”; Paul Krugman was arguing for it, while Larry Summers was arguing against.

Krugman found himself with the home-team advantage through being paired with Canadian economist David Rosenberg; Summers had strong rhetorical backup from Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer. But at heart, this was Krugman vs Summers, which is an inspired match-up: especially in election season, one of the most important criteria for any debate is that it not cleave easily and obviously along party-political lines. That way people just end up voting their party and rehearsing tired party-political talking points.

This debate, because it took place within a basically Keynesian, leftist worldview, was very interesting.

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Angela Merkel hints at a fiscal union for the Eurozone — Bloomberg

Meanwhile, her party votes to allow voluntary exits from the Euro — Bloomberg

The United States has youth unemployment in line with Arab Spring countries — Rortybomb

The SF Fed thinks there’s more than a 50% chance of a US recession next year — FRBSF.

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Few people despise paper checks as much as I do. They’re expensive, insecure, anachronistic, and dangerously reliant on the less-than-stellar delivery record of the US Postal Service. Recently, banks in my neighborhood have been swapping out their ATMs with new machines which read checks — something which must be a hugely expensive investment, for them, in a technology which deserves to be killed off with extreme prejudice.

So I’m a great fan of the way in which states including Oregon, South Carolina, and California are doing away with the unemployment check. If you want unemployment benefits, have them directly deposited into your bank account. Or, if you’re unbanked or otherwise don’t want to do things that way, get your unemployment benefits on a prepaid debit card.

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I had a long lunch meeting on Friday with a hedge-fund manager with an astonishing ability to navigate the Bloomberg Blackberry app. And there was one chart in particular which he clearly pulled up on a regular basis: the spread on senior unsecured bank debt in Europe. As Lisa Pollack points out, it’s tempting but dangerous to look at the iTraxx Senior Financials index in this context, because it’s an easy index to follow but it also includes non-bank names like Aviva, Axa, and Munich Re. So here’s the 3-month Euribor/Eonia spread, instead, which also has the advantage of going back to 2007. It’s not the best indicator when it comes to measuring banks’ cost of funds, but it’s fantastic if what you’re looking for is a guide to how stressed the Euroland funding market is.

This chart comes from a 40-page note on European bank liquidity published by Daniel Davies and Jag Yogarajah of Exane BNP Paribas; I can highly recommend you try to get yourself a copy of it somehow.

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I gave a talk on Thursday at the AppNexus Summit in front of a few hundred digital advertising types. The first part of the talk was a macro overview, but when the Q&A session started, all that anybody wanted to talk about was my take on online media. And given how granular the discussions over the course of the rest of the day were going to be, I wanted to push back a bit against some of the unexamined assumptions which I encounter most of the time when I meet online-media people.

The first is that there’s something necessary and inevitable about ad-driven models dominating the online media industry. That’s certainly how things have worked out to date, but there was nothing inevitable about it. From the very early days of the World Wide Web, many extremely smart people pushed very hard to develop a workable micropayments architecture online.

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Paul Krugman explains the Euro crisis in one sentence — Business Insider

An interesting attack on ECRI’s recession call — Stone Street Advisors

Pretty much everyone at MF Global was fired en masse — Reuters

29% of all US mortgages are underwater — Ritholtz

And the gigantic foreclosure settlement won’t give homeowners very much — Huffington Post

Unemployment for young veterans is 30% and rising — Businessweek

While homelessness for female veterans has increased each of the last six years — LA Times

UK MPs will probably find James Murdoch “ill-informed” but not “mendacious”.

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