Since you asked, the initials are a holdover from when I started my blog almost three years ago. At the time I was thinking I may want to maintain some anonymity – a notion long since abandoned. Since then I have established an identity in several commenting systems and blogs using the initials, so I continue to use it.

As regards the rest, you are going to have to step up your game. It is indeed Justin’s blog and I am just a guest here. During the “troopergate” debates, a mob of commenters complete with torches and pitchforks were demanding that Justin deliver my head on a stake. As you can see, it was ineffective. I have no explanation for it myself.

(mw – does it stand for Mystery Writer? Why don’t you have a name? Or at least capitalized initials?)

Seriously, though…

The posts by Alan and Justin fit in with the respectful tone described in the “About Us” section, but the crossfire-style, bickering tone set by mw does not. Regardless of whether he (or she?) has his/her facts straight.

If this were my blog (it IS your blog, justin, isn’t it?) I would have a talk about tone with my co-bloggers

The former notion is, well, uncontroversial. The latter is unsupportable. And It really doesn’t diminish the thrust of your point to acknowledge that Kanjorski overstated things, because your point is still supportable on the basis of concern about where we might have been headed without federal stabilization actions.

Here is another link for Crane’s Data found by commenter Victor in the last thread. He makes the same point, quoting hard numbers.

There are a host of errors in the segment referenced above. First, $550 billion in a matter of hours is ridiculous. While money market mutual funds (not “money market accounts”) were seeing tremendous redemption pressure, the amount totalled at most half that over the entire week (not hours). Money market accounts, which are presumably bank money market deposit accounts (Kanjorski later cites a $250K FDIC limit increase), likely only saw modest outflows. (Retail money market mutual funds saw only modest declines during the week, so money market deposit accounts likely only saw modest redemptions.)

Saying the drawdown would have grown to $5 trillion is ridiculous. Bank savings and money market deposit accounts only amount to $4.0 trillion in total, and money market mutual funds totaled $3.6 trillion at the time. While the situation was certainly dire and unprecedented, somebody is confusing an awful lot of facts and numbers.

What happened that week was bad enough. It did not need to be embellished by Kanjorski’s irresponsible apocalyptic fantasies. I repeat – Kanjorski’s story, as related on the cspan clip, is false.

mw, I really, really do not appreciate someone posting info like the previous one that offers figures that do not even come close to proving your point. That rise in bank deposits ~10 days later is easily explained as a bunch of scared investors salvaging what was left of their 401ks from a rapidly tanking stock market & depositing them into newly insured bank accounts until they could figure out what their next step should be. It is the only rational explanation considering the information I have seen. To imply otherwise I believe to be grossly ingenuous. Maybe I am being too harsh, but it certainly, at the very least, was not a well thought out post.

“I find it extremely troubling that my fellow bloggers would believe a columnist from Portfolio who only suggests that Congressman Kanjorski’s claims were false without providing any evidence or checking what the players actually said.” – JG

Actually your fellow blogger did no such thing. The columnist, Felix Salmon, did indeed provide specific evidence (linked directly from the Federal Reserve) that refuted Kanjorski’s specific claims of a $550 Billion out flow from Money Market funds in two hours. From the column:

“Substantially all of the outflows came from institutional accounts: retail investors never panicked. If you look at the weekly data for bank savings deposits, including money market deposit accounts, they stood at $3,167.4 billion on the 15th, and rose to $3,191.4 billion on the 22nd.”

He also did check specifically with what the primary “player” (Kanjorkski) said, quoting him telling the same story in two different venues, and giving two different sources for the story. The first time in the Congressional hearing – presumably referencing the now discredited NY Post story – and the second time on CSPAN, when the source was now the Fed Reserve (same source as Salmon’s linked report).

Finally, I never said he lied. I said he “misremembered his source” for this clearly embellished story in the CSPAN version. Which is exactly what he did.

I hope you are less troubled now.

mw – [Your fellow blogger]