I’ve been watching and reading about events in Georgia and Ossetia with some interest. I didn’t post over the weekend because there really didn’t seem much left to say. Earnings season is tapering off with no real shocks, just a bunch of financial write-downs and a sense of general foreboding in all but the export […]
Read more...I’m talking platform leverage – the sort of leverage you can get in a proxy battle by putting a page like this in front of millions of people, many of whom may in fact own your stock, the week before the meeting, for free: Or, the leverage in media you can get by interjecting a […]
Read more...Krugman doesn’t think inflation expectations will lead to wage growth: … inflation is well under control: wages aren’t taking off, the labor market is weak, and once oil and food price spikes end we’ll be, if anything, in a deflationary environment… I don’t think there’s any fundamental inflation problem, just a one-time hit on food […]
Read more...Brad Setser thinks that China is again holding the RMB down to maintain export volume in the face of softening global demand. From the comments (my emphasis): China prefers subsidizing US consumption of Chinese goods to subsidizing Chinese consumption of Chinese goods… if China’s foreign asset accumulation continues at $800b a year, it will add $3.2 […]
Read more...Ok. Oil. Exxon Mobil reported a second-quarter profit of nearly $12 billion — a number that works out (as many did) to about $39 for every man, woman and child in America; $90,000 a minute etc. Mark Thoma has a think about the future price of gasoline for us. The punch line: If past global […]
Read more...When people ask what I do for a living I tell them I do wealth preservation. If they ask how I do that, I say I do three things: read the direction of inevitable changes in the world, discover and value investment possibilities in the context of those changes, and allocate risk capital among those […]
Read more...The FT’s Gillian Tett writes up a blow-by-blow of the credit crisis; and the spread chart is a good reminder of how different things still are: On August 9 2007, the European Central Bank sent shock waves around world financial capitals when it injected €95bn ($150bn, £75bn) worth of funds into the money markets to […]
Read more...I like this cartoon (h/t Kedrosky) for perspective on the past year, though I would perhaps swap a few of the roles around. To me, it’s the regulators that lacked the courage to prick this bubble, and the investors that lacked a brain. I never expected the lenders to have a heart. The Wizard of […]
Read more...Paul Davis here, with my first go at guest posting for Yves so you’ll have to excuse me if I’m rusty on the formatting. Another week gone by; a pile of charts for you to consider (a click will mostly give you a larger size). Krugman made the point with this chart that the Fed […]
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