Pentagon report investigated lasers that put voices in your head PhysOrg. So your cousin may not be schizophrenic after all. Australia allows ‘podgy posties’ BBC What collectors can and cannot do MarketWatch. A sign of the times. Dog Issued Credit Card KNSD San Diego Did Gordon Brown have a choice over Northern Rock? Willem Buiter, […]
Read more...We were one of the first to say that former Citigroup Charles Prince would come to regret his end-of-the-cycle-is-nigh comment initially reported in the Financial Times: Chuck Prince on Monday dismissed fears that the music was about to stop for the cheap credit-fuelled buy-out boom, saying Citigroup was “still dancing.” We are so bold as […]
Read more...It appears MBIA’s board did not have the appetite for a showdown with Sptizer and Dinallo over a breakup, which they threatened to implement whether the bond insurer dooperated or not. It is going to be interesting to see how this goes down with Warburg Pincus, which made a huge bet on MBIA due to […]
Read more...Ever since Eliot Spitzer threatened the troubled monoline insurers that he’d break them up, everyone has acted as if that’s a viable option. But this talk of a split reminds me of movies about Hollywood, where someone buttonholes a producer with his pet idea: “See, it’s like Flashdance, except you reverse it: the girl is […]
Read more...The pain and the costs of the dislocation in the auction rate securities market only continues to rise. In case no one has yet said this clearly enough, this product was a disaster waiting to happen. The idea that one is going to fund long term obligations in a short term funding market is nuts, […]
Read more...Readers may recall that a week or two ago, there was a good deal of chatter in the ether about reports issued by the Federal Reserve that showed that the banking system, for the first time ever recorded, showed negative net non borrowed reserves. Some commentators and analysts were alarmed; others regarded it as no […]
Read more...It’s popular to beat up on the drug industry these days, but it is a deserving target. The prices drug companies charge in the US are outlandish; most of their so-called research is on “new drug applications.” But over 80% of those are other uses of existing drugs. For instance, Wellbutrin, an anti-depressant, is also […]
Read more...Ah, another quarter, another set of writedowns by financial firms, or so it goes these days. There have been various sightings of new source of acute pain: leveraged loans, commercial real estate, auction rate securities. So far, analysts have been mainly talking about each problem separately, but as earnings season approaches, they are now considering […]
Read more...Patentability Of Business Model And Software Patents Comes Under Court Scrutiny TechDirt Saudi Threats And US/UK Bribes Hit Us In The Guts Culture of Life News. This post includes a very lengthy and useful discussion of the history of the Sauds and who did what to whom in the Arabian peninsula from roughly 1800 onward. […]
Read more...Our colleague Susan Webber’s article, “The Dark Side of Optimism” is the cover story in the current issue of The Conference Board Review. It discusses the deep roots of optimism and how it can undermine critical thinking and accurate risk assessment. Her piece is wide-ranging, looking at psychological research, cognitive biases, cultural icons, military history, […]
Read more...We’ve been saying that the legal basis for splitting up the bond guarantors and preferring one group of policyholders (municipalities) over everyone else seems pretty dubious and therefore is likely to trigger litigation. Analysts at Bank of America agree. From Bloomberg: Regulators’ plans to break up bond insurers into “good” businesses covering municipal debt and […]
Read more...Fedwatcher Tim Duy (posting on Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View) read Bernanke’s recent Congressional testimony as saying that further rate cuts really weren’t warranted give the Fed’s medium term forecast. However, Duy has muffed some calls before by assuming that the Fed would stick by its official pronouncements rather than be swayed by the baying of […]
Read more...The repeated rounds of Fed rate cuts have led the dollar to fall against most currencies save those maintaining currency pegs. While the yuan has appreciated somewhat, it hasn’t been sufficient to have much impact on Chinese trade surplus with the US (2007 was a record year). And because China and its peers are having […]
Read more...With conventional wisdom holding that private sector solutions are better than public stewardship, to have the government winding up owning a financial institution looks bad. It revives the memories of the regulatory failures that led the bank to be bailed out in the first place. Oddly, though, Northern Rock could have been allowed to collapse […]
Read more...Poverty is Poison Paul Krugman, New York Times Citigroup Plans to Hire ‘Hundreds’ in Japan to Target Wealthy Bloomberg. I have long been skeptical of the portrayal of Japan as a basket case. Iranian Oil Bourse Started Trading Today, Will Also Accept Roubles The Prudent Investor Animal dung and climate change Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends […]
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