This front page New York Times story on factory closings in the Pearl River delta covers ground already discussed in some detail on this blog. However, its report gives more detail on the resulting labor unrest. From the New York Times: For decades, the steamy Pearl River Delta area of southern Guangdong Province served as […]
Read more...In the wake of the Treasury Department foisting equity infusions onto nine banks, not all of which wanted or needed them, the industry has decided to get in front of these initiatives. The latest bright idea. of guarantees of bank debt, gets a thumbs down from the intended beneficiaries. But sadly, it isn’t the general […]
Read more...Dean Baker goes full bore after two deserving targets, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers, at TPM Cafe. Key excerpts: Along with former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, Rubin and Summers compose the high priesthood of the bubble economy. Their policy of one-sided financial deregulation is responsible for the current economic catastrophe. It is important […]
Read more...Songbirds ‘sing from hymn sheet’ BBC Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? Smithsonian Why Palin Still Matters Andrew Sullivan No to Lawrence Summers The Nation. A petition against Summers as Treasury Secretary. Should GE be a AAA company? Ed Harrison. If you blinked your eyes, you might have missed that GE got a bailout too. […]
Read more...The markets in the US did not take at all well to Henry Paulson’s announcement that he wanted to get his hands on the rest of the TARP allotment (a remaining $350 billion) and spend it so as to help consumers go to the mall again. As one correspondend, Andrew, noted: 1) Is the dog-chasing-its-tail […]
Read more...Too many hot button financial news stories tonight, generally not a good sign for the short-term market outlook. GM is twisting in the breeze, saying it won’t make it through year end without help, but the Bush administration, which has been liberal with aid to anyone who can pretend to be remotely connected to the […]
Read more...The latest back-handed insult may be yet another variant of the Bush “we don’t do multilateralism” syndrome. Unfortunately, as various pundits writing at the Financial Times have pointed out, the US’s stranglehold on power is slipping. Even Obama in the campaign repeatedly said that a country cannot maintain military dominance if it is not a […]
Read more...Last night, we posted a VoxEU article on the unraveling of Iceland that (among other things) said that the problem was that the financial sector had gotten so large that the government could not possibly rescue it. The author made a comment in passing that indicated he thought this was not a problem shared by […]
Read more...As of this writing, the Nikkei is down nearly 500 points. Singapore is least trashed, down 3%, the Hang Seng is down over 6%. The apparent triggers are first, a lousy industrial output report out of China, confirming the various informal indicators of economic weakening there we have tallied, and second, a vote no confidence […]
Read more...As readers may have noticed, we have gotten exercised about how brazenly the Treasury has been in lavishing cash on favored interests. Felix Salmon took up the theme, admittedly with less choler: There does indeed seem to have been a visible change in Treasury policy since the election. Until that point, it cared a little […]
Read more...The idea that reducing carbon emissions is bad for investors is in at least in part an urban legend. In an earlier post, we noted: In 1997, British Petroleum decided to lower its carbon emissions below the 1990 level by 2010. It achieved the goal in 3 years rather than 13 at a cost of […]
Read more...Race to save world’s rarest wolf BBC How your unique body odour could identify you as effectively as a fingerprint Daily Mail QE2 to be ripped up for new life as a Dubai floating hotel Times Online What’s wrong with Lloyds’ takeover of HBOS? Just follow your nose Jeff Randall, Telegraph The great bond market […]
Read more...For those of you who only caught bits and snippets of the Iceland crisis, this VoxEU post by Jon Danielsson provides a useful recap. And if you are familiar with broad outlines of the unravelling, the piece also recaps the policy errors that fed into the crisis. The article focuses on the role of high […]
Read more...The high concept of this Wall Street Journal story is that because the stocks have fallen so badly, institutional investor may have to cut their real estate exposures to keep them from becoming a disproportionately large component of their portfolios. Note however that this may not be achieved via sales, but simply by not making […]
Read more...Although this New York Times article gives a good overview of how the economic downturn is affecting legal practices, it does a bit of a disservice in implying that law is recession proof. Some types of law are highly cyclical: M&A, and to a lesser degree, securities law. While bankruptcies pick up in downtimes, they […]
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