TSA is secretly watching you LA Times (hat tip DoctoRx) An Old West Crime Makes a Big Comeback NBC Dallas-Fort Worth (hat tip reader John D) Cryptographic voting debuts MIT News (hat tip reader John D) Manhattan Institute Says “New York must declare a financial emergency” Michael Shedlock Medical workers balk at mandatory flu vaccines […]
Read more...The theater is starting to get interesting. Here in the US we have banker pay theater masquerading as the real thing. Kenneth Feinberg, the so-called pay-czar, struggles to collect a few scalps at the handful of TARP institutions under his domain, with the ever-intransigent AIG making headlines. This of course is meant to distract attention […]
Read more...John Hempton illustrates the operation of an underdiscussed cognitive bias, social validation, which social psychologist Robert Cialdini described as one of the six primary influence techniques in his classic Influence: The Art of Persuasion. And it can be deadly, as Hempton warns: Saturday afternoon and I had volunteer lifesaving duty. My (broken) collarbone is knitted […]
Read more...I don’t know if any readers know Jay Leonhart, but his “Sometimes I Think” from Salamander Pie is my theme song. I cannot relate to a lot of behavior considered normal. So I hate to personalize this discussion, but the subject of this post involves one of those areas of human activity I find to […]
Read more...The deep-sea crab that eats trees BBC Enemies need not be insane Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times. This piece makes a more important point. Good news for slimmers as scientists rethink calorie counting Times. Huh? The UK has just about as bad an epidemic of overweight and obesity as the US, and the officialdom is saying […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. Oh dear, there he goes again. After sensibly calling for a jobs summit to deal with the problem of rising unemployment, President Obama’s Herbert Hoover-like alter ego has re-emerged again to warn us again about the evils of government deficit […]
Read more...2012: Carnival of Bunkum h+ (hat tip reader David C) Tranquility Base ABC News (hat tip reader John D) The Science Behind ‘Stop Me If I’ve Told You This’ LiveScience (hat tip reader John D) Some Misses on the Bear Stearns Acquittals Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review Insight: The sweet fix of CoCos Gillian Tett, […]
Read more...Paul Krugman has a good op-ed tonight on how Germany has fared versus the US in the global financial crisis. Recall that there was much hectoring of Germany early on, for its failure to enact stimulus programs. German readers were puzzled, since Germany has a lot of social safety nets that serve as automatic counter-cyclical […]
Read more...Goldman is a law unto itself, with no respect for propriety or notions like “fair dealing” (which in many contexts supercede particular contractual provisions). The latest incident of Goldman scumminess is in one of the opaque corners of the credit markets, namely, collateralized debt obligations. Goldman launched a major program of synthetic collateralized debt obligations […]
Read more...A new bit of chicanery illustrates why it’s a lousy idea for the government to allow wards of the state like the GSEs and AIG to operate like kinda-sort private enterprises. When banks were nationalized in Sweden and Norway, the top brass and the boards were fired, and they were given strict goals and operating […]
Read more...Yesterday, I pointed out that a study by one of the leading economic modeling companies shows that military spending increases unemployment and decreases economic growth. I have located (giant hat tip to Gordon) a paper by economist Robert Pollin published in 2007 by The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst – […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns Is it just me or did Secretary Geithner just talk out of other side of his mouth? Today he wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal with two Asian leaders to mark a big meeting of APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation) in Singapore. The WSJ article started out […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns L. Randall Wray has a post up at New Deal 2.0 which puts forward an idea which is pretty innovative. I would label it a private sector replacement for unemployment insurance. It’s the kind of thinking that might bring Obama out of a policy cul-de-sac as the economy hemorrhages […]
Read more...Thanks for your kind notes, I am getting better, but now even more behind the eight ball than ever, aaargh, and now have page proofs to contend with. This book process never ends. Dog lost in Afghan battle returns BBC China’s Empty City China Digital Times (hat tip reader Michael) Why Jim Rogers Isn’t Buying […]
Read more...Dear God, if you read the media, you’d really think the Congressional huffing and puffing at the banking industry was going to solve the “too big to fail” problem, or even make much of a difference. Folks, I hate to tell you, these remedies fall so far short of what it would take as to […]
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