By George Washington of Washington’s Blog . Daniel Gross points out that part of the reason that the American stock markets are going up even though unemployment is rising and the real economy suffering is because multinational corporations headquartered in the U.S. are experiencing strong sales abroad: Here’s a puzzle: The stock markets are doing […]
Read more...Overweight Americans Push Back on Health Debate New York Times. I am going to be non-PC. I am not sympathetic. This is a public health crisis (diabetes, for starters) and we have people defending…”weight diversity?” Consequences of the Lehman failure Jim Hamilton Health Care Bill Passes Through House. Politics Still SUCK EconomPic Data The media […]
Read more...Remember Lake Woebegone: all the women are beautiful, and all the children are above average. And all banks in robust health. Self assessment (and undue self regard) was one of the big fallacies of the famed stress tests. The banks were asked to run scenarios on their own loan portfolios, with no independent verification of […]
Read more...From Veneroso Associates’ US Economy October Employment Report, ” Huge Discrepancy Between the Payroll and Household Surveys: Executive Summary 1. According to BLS, payrolls fell at a 188,000 a month rate over the last three months. But their own household survey says employment fell at a 589,000 a month rate. 2. Why the discrepancy? 3. […]
Read more...As readers probably know, the health care reform bill passed the House tonight, by a thin margin and with the Democrats offering a large concession by limiting reimbursements on abortions. Thomas Frank has a good piece in the New York Times tonight, in which he argues that health care reform might lead more doctors to […]
Read more...Three bald bears perplex experts BBC Antidepressants and Violence EconoSpeak. One of my pet peeves is how psychoactive medications are handed out like candy in the US. Just go to your MD, say you are exhausted, and once they eliminate anemia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and low thryoid, they assume it’s in your head and will […]
Read more...David Einhorn, who enjoys his considerable reputation for hard-fought battles against firms with shaky finances and dubious accounting (Allied Capital and Lehman), has taken aim at a new and equally deserving target: credit default swaps. In an interesting bit of synchronicity, Einhorn’s comments in a letter to investors overlap to a considerable degree with a […]
Read more...By George Washington of Washington’s Blog. Investors are basically rational, right? In fact, as many studies have demonstrated, the answer is no. But instead of wading through all of the investment psychology research, let’s look at research into people’s basic reasoning abilities. Bear with me for a minute. A study in an area unrelated to […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns The Obama Administration is captured. To understand why it has acted as it has, one doesn’t have to take the view that its efforts to save the banking industry were a deliberate attempt to line bankers’ pockets by transferring money from taxpayers to the banking industry. One need merely […]
Read more...Newborn Babies Cry in Native Tongue Live Science (hat tip reader John D) Understanding long term chronic pain symptoms from minor motor vehicle accidents RFK Action Front, This is intriguing. Second Life creates virtual world for businesses Raw Story (hat tip reader John D) Fannie Mae’s results – oh, and what if Bank of America […]
Read more...As Gillian Tett points out in the Financial Times today, clearing derivatives centrally has come to be viewed in policy circles as a magical solution. As a result, it has not gotten the scrutiny it deserves. The reason for the enthusiasm is that, in theory, a clearinghouse would make sure all agreements were adequately backstopped, […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since them, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. A number of economists, economic policymakers, regulators, and central bankers have attempted to explain away their failure to both […]
Read more...It should come as no surprise that those at the top of the food chain get preferential treatment on all levels. But this still stinks to high heaven. Employees of the Goldman, the Fed, Citigroup, and other banks are getting H1N1 vaccine allotments out of proportion to what can be justified from a public health […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns I was reading Kid Dynamite’s account of the recent Treasury – Finance Blogger meeting after having read a bunch of others (see them all in Abnormal Returns’ Nov 4th links). And I was struck by his characterization of the thinking at Treasury in regards to the financial crisis. I […]
Read more...Fake AP Stylebook Steers You Completely Wrong — With Style Wired Rare whale gathering sighted BBC How central bank repos create conflicts of interest FT Alphaville Did We Learn Anything? Carry Trade Edition EconomPic Data Lending must support the real economy Dirk Bezemer, Financial Times Men in part-time work paid less than women Independent Sympathy […]
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