I sincerely doubt this will ever happen (imagine the backlash from groups arguing that excess avoirdupois isn’t a person’s fault and hence shouldn’t be punished) but those who have beenn compressed more than once by an overweight neighbor on a plane might applaud. From Bloomberg: Imagine two scales at the airline ticket counter, one for […]
Read more...A quick recap of Soros’s prepared remarks at the Senate hearings on energy market manipulation, which I watched just now. The billionaire said that he had a view of bubbles that departed from conventional wisdom about financial markets. They start with a trend but the dymamic becomes self reinforcing and increasingly disconnected from reality. For […]
Read more...Lehman managed to escape the same fate as Bear Stearns around the Ides of March partly due to the heroic intervention of the Fed, in part to reporting first quarter profits. A member of the skeptically-minded short cohort described the earnings as a sham, and noted that they depended entirely on counting the increase of […]
Read more...I’ve tried to have more dignified labels for recurrent phenomena, but I keep defaulting to “scary bad” when I get updates on China. The latest is that Michael Pettis does his usual workmanlike job of trying to make sense of China’s generally incomplete reporting on its funds flows. While one suspects the gaps are in […]
Read more...The UK’s Guardian is publishing three extracts from a new book by , Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, “The Gods That Failed: How Blind Faith in Markets Has Cost Us Our Future.” It seemed worthy of note because it illustrates the backlash against the Wall Street types caricatured by Tom Wolfe as “Masters of the […]
Read more...Gideon Rachman in “We cannot go on eating like this” in the Financial Times, points out the increasing heated discussion between advanced and emerging economies over resource issues, particularly food. The positions of the two camps are fairly easy to set forth: the West says, “You can’t have what we have, it’ll ruin the planet,” […]
Read more...Bamboo instant houses will soon shelter Sichuan quake victims PhysOrg City banker behind tube drinking party fears sack Guardian Foreclosure Bus Tour, Sign of Housing Bust, Hits New York Area Bloomberg Grasso’s Grit May Win After All New York Times. Ugh. Will Israel Attack Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Before the End of the Bush Administration? Joschka […]
Read more...The theory that the recent calm in the financial sector was the eye of the storm, rather than a sign of turbulence clearing for good, seems to be getting support. The stock market reacted badly to the ouster of Wachovia CEO Kennedy Thompson, seeing it as a harbinger of a report of losses for the […]
Read more...It appears the US central bank got taken to the woodshed at a conference hosted by the New York Fed for overly aggressive rate cuts, but despite jeering from the peanut gallery, it looks likely that the Fed will hold pat until at least the fall. While I have no idea of how representative his […]
Read more...While some writers in the US have taken note of the fact that the Fed’s rate cuts have propelled the US into negative real interest rate territory, until recently, the role of overly-permissive monetary policy in inflation-fraught countries like China and the Gulf States has gotten comparatively little attention. Last week, the Economist devoted an […]
Read more...‘Super Sherpa’ climbs to clean up Everest PhysOrg Yves Saint Laurent, 71, Is Dead; A Giant of Couture for 45 Years New York Times. YSL not only changed how women dress, but he and his partner Pierre Berge revolutionized the business of fashion. Greg Mankiw’s Marginal Educational Product Is Negative Brad DeLong Punditocracy Barry Ritholtz […]
Read more...It has been truly remarkable how consumer spending has held up, well, appeared to hold up, in the face of strong headwinds. Household debt to equity at record levels. Fewer refis to facilitate dis-saving as an illusion of prosperity. Home equity lines cut back. A deteriorating employment market (not-so-bad employment stats masking a fall in […]
Read more...There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the alphabet soup of new Federal Reserve facilities having hidden costs and generating unintended consequences. The biggest focus of concern is that the assets that the central bank has taken on may come a cropper, leaving the taxpayer holding the bag. Reader Lune has pointed out some examples […]
Read more...Reader Michael called to my attention a wide-ranging interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the Black Swan and professional iconoclast, in the Times of London. The article is colorful, wide-ranging, and a bit long, so I’ve excerpted some of the most provocative bits. Needless to say, I am particularly taken by his dim view […]
Read more...Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times in “First Comes the Swap. Then It’s the Knives.” delves into a dispute between UBS an Paramax, a Connecticut-based hedge fund group over a credit default swap written by Paramax in 2007 on a subprime CDO (you can already guess how this movie ends). Morgenson-bashing is a popular […]
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