The Financial Times has a long analysis, “Value to Unlock,” on how various financial players are starting to pick and choose among distressed mortgage assets. This may prove to be premature (recall how Wall Street firms eagerly bought subprime brokers through January 2007) and the housing market itself appears unlikely to hit its floor before […]
Read more...Is divorce bad for the parents? PhysOrg British Gas fights Accenture over billing Times Online. A world class IT mess. Shipping rates near record levels Financial Times The case for invading Myanmar Asia Times, Mirable dictu. The Asia Times, which is is pretty unsparing in taking the US to task, is calling for a US […]
Read more...Steve Waldman has a typically top notch post at Interfluidity,”Let’s not write the Fed a blank check,” in which he dissects the implications of the Fed’s request to Congress to pay interest on bank reserves. Waldman explains the technical workings and the pros, and gets to the real issue. This represents a change from a […]
Read more...Bloomberg reports that the company that is the biggest property owner in downtown LA, with concentrated holdngs in the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles is trading at a deep discount to book value minus borrowings. The reason? The company may not be able to refinance debt coming due. Now one may legitimately take book […]
Read more...Why is it that some ideas capture the popular imagination and others die on the vine? A lot has to do with timing, getting noticed by opinion leaders, having a pithy turn of phrase. Yet I’ve seen articles and books that (at least to me) make fundamentally important observations and go nowhere, and others which […]
Read more...Cassandra takes what she admits to be a flier at a topic worthy of deeper examination: Do you think The People are less discontented under an inflationary regime or a deflationary regime? She reaches a conclusion, no doubt colored by her deep association with Japan, that deflation is not as bad as it is touted […]
Read more...Mangrove loss ‘put Burma at risk‘ BBC Shifting Priorities at the Wheel Science News. More on the perils of multitasking while driving. Kaiser Security Guard Strike Dave Johnson, Seeing the Forest. The writer reports a “near blackout” on the strike, and indeed, a Google News search shows it only in a few local newspapers and […]
Read more...A New York Times story discusses a new manifestation of housing stress, namely, that people who have euphemistically had to downsize their housing are inceasingly unable to keep up with the storage charges and are having their possessions auctioned off. It would be nice if we could all emulate Buddhists and take such reversals with […]
Read more...What would we do without Brad Setser to give us a hard, analytical look at trade and international funds flows? Setser tells us that the headline news on the trade deficit, namely, that it shrank in March, is misleading. When you dig deeper, and in particular pull out petroleum-related flows, it reveals that real export […]
Read more...I must admit that I have never fallen in love with an investment. Yet per the summary of an article in International Journal of Psychoanalysis (hat tip 2ubh, investors are prone to “emotional inflation” similar to what people experience in romantic relationships. But the piece leaves key questions unanswered: do depressives or paranoid schizoids make […]
Read more...You’ve Seen the YouTube Video; Now Try the Documentary New York Times. In case you aren’t one of the 30 million who has seen Battle at Kruger. U.K. turns CCTV, terrorism laws on pooping dogs CNet. Note it has been determined that the CCTV does not deter crime, so it’s nice to learn it is […]
Read more...From the New York Times: “Taxpayers shouldn’t be taking on the risk of foreclosure,” said Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman. A little late to try to prevent that….
Read more...Someone needs to tell Microsoft to behave. By way of background, in December 2004, Microsoft lost its final appeal on an EU antitrust case in which it was found guilty of tying its operating system to its media player, undermining competition and hurting consumer choice, and for failing to give rivals the information they needed […]
Read more...The question above may seem foolish. Oil has just passed $124 a barrel despite improvement in the dollar. Commodities prices are moving less in lockstep than before (gold and wheat in particular have backed off significantly from their highs) suggesting that buying is not the result of the basic materials version of a land grab. […]
Read more...In Project Syndicate (hat tip Mark Thoma), Joseph Stiglitz takes on an increasingly common approach among central banks, namely, to announce a formal target for inflation and use interest rate policy to attempt to achieve it. Note the US does not use this approach, although one of the Fed’s responsibilities is to maintain price stability. […]
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