I’m in danger of sticking my neck out, but is it possible that Virkram Pandit, Citi’s CEO, is doing a good job? It’s way too early to make a call. The markets and stock watcher have the attention span of a fruit fly, when corporate successes are built slowly, and the less fanfare, the greater […]
Read more...Meat in a low-carbon world BBC. On the difficulties of trying to eat an environmentally friendly diet. Repossession orders at record high as homeowners struggle Times Online EMU is more unworkable than ever Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph The US: Your masters of the universe William J Astore, Asia Times. On the deeper meaning of the Air […]
Read more...The great imperial struggles of the 1800s were over control of strategic or otherwise prized resources, and the hostilities they generated helped stoke World Wars I and II. Many believe the Iraq war was all about oil. China is considering adopting a contemporary variant of the colonial model. A Ministry of Agriculture proposal suggests that […]
Read more...A Wall Street Journal survey of 53 economists found the great majority said that the spike in food and energy prices is the result of supply and demand, not speculation. At the same time, the average forecast among this group is that oil will be at $93 a barrel by year end. While the article […]
Read more...One of our pet interests has been how the use of mathematics and models can unwittingly enable people to fool themselves. We see this regularly when working on deals. The model for the target business’ performance somehow becomes more real than the company. When the numbers don’t work, if you can come up with a […]
Read more...India has halted futures trading in certain types of commodities in an effort to combat inflation by reducing speculation. Observers argue this is likely to be ineffective, arguing that the price rise is fundamentally driven. It is true that just about every major economy ex the US and Japan is suffering from inflation (and most […]
Read more...Gods, sometimes I am horrifically slow on the uptake. Felix Salmon continues a discussion with Dean Rotbart that effectively started at the econobloggers’ panel at the Milken Institute. Dean was the moderator, and did a very good job in generating a lively session (something I must say that was absent on most of the presentations […]
Read more...Martin Feldstein, who as a Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Reagan and an advocate of Social Security reform, has been a surprisingly open critic of the Fed’s and Bush Administration’s responses to our current economic woes. Feldstein has been regularly writing op eds opposed to some of the viewpoints and actions of […]
Read more...At VoxEU, Luigi Spaventa makes a forceful case that the remedies to the credit crisis are provisional at best and more work needs to be done: The global financial system may be caught in a downward spiral as market and funding illiquidity reinforce each other… Prolonged financial distress, which has now lasted for almost a […]
Read more...MBIA has brazenly advanced its own interests at the expense of investors and policyholders. A partial list: Issuing a disappointing earnings release in the middle of the night in the hopes that it would garner less attention that way Asserting it needed no more capital while the Dinallo-led “save the monolines” effort was still underway. […]
Read more...Makeshift bakery tempts trekkers on top of the world BBC US State Department loses a lot of laptops IT News. And as many as 400 belonged to the Anti-Terrorist Program. CCTV boom has failed to slash crime, say police Guardian Credit Seizure? $6 Million Pay Turns on Relationships Bloomberg. On the high comp of CDS […]
Read more...While George Soros today said that he believed the worst consequences to the financial system are past, he was far from bullish about the economy. The veteran investor believes that the real world impact is only beginning to be felt. Given that the last housing recession of the late 1980s-early 1990s took 15 quarters to […]
Read more...The strength of activity at the major spring art auctions reflects several factors: the falling dollar, the search for a store of value of inflation, and if you are of the bearish persuasion, the fact that art is a lagging indicator. From the Financial Times: Art records fell on Tuesday for works by Claude Monet, […]
Read more...An odd set of voices is beginning to question the wisdom of America’s extraordinarily generous subsidies to homeowners. Paul Krugman once remarked that American like to consume houses, while the French prefer to consume vacations, but we shouldn’t overlook the role of incentives in those choices. At the Milken Institute Global Conference, a true disciple […]
Read more...Below is a provocative line of thought from an anonymous reader. It supports a gut feeling that I have been unable to prove, namely, that lowering of boundaries between markets (ranging from the large number of global macro hedge funds to the large number of retail currency speculators in Japan) is destabilizing. I’ve found the […]
Read more...