Earlier this week, on the eve of a G-20 meeting, some European ministers were not only threatening to implement tough restrictions on the financial services industry, but they also asserted that the G20 was largely in alignment. That did not seem credible, particularly given the US propensity to talk tough and do very little on […]
Read more...The solar industry is already suffering from significant overcapacity, yet incumbents are adding still more manufacturing to try to secure a cost competitive position after the shakeout. This chart, prepared by Digitimes using data from The Information Network (hat tip reader Michael), sums up the yawning gap between demand and capacity: The Information Network forecasts […]
Read more...Arctic ‘warmest in 2,000 years’ BBC Notes from the Space Elevator Conference h+ (hat tip reader David C) Photographer to the Tsar: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Library of Congress (hat tip reader John D). 100 year old color photos, and impressive quality How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? Paul Krugman, New York Times (hat tip […]
Read more...Joseph Stiglitz takes issue with the view of economists (well, economists surveyed by Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, which not surprisingly have a Pollyannish optimistic streak) that the economy is in or on the verge of a recovery. The real issue is the ongoing con job. Team Obama has made it clear that it […]
Read more...The New York Times has a story tonight, “Judges’ Frustration Grows With Mortgage Servicers,” which narrowly speaking, is not bad, but illustrates a frustrating propensity of the budget and time constrained MSM to fail to dig into the meaty issues behind its articles. The piece is yet another sighting in the Servicers Behaving Badly saga. […]
Read more...Canadians research zombie attacks TG Daily (hat tip reader John D). I wonder if this study can be applied to zombie banks. Listening to the Big Bang Starts With a Bang (hat tip reader John D) Great Barrier Reef Said to Face Catastrophic Damage Bloomberg (hat tip DoctoRx). We’ve written about this before, and John […]
Read more...Perhaps I place too much emphasis on turn of phrase. However, the fact that the EU officialdom is starting to use feral imagery in describing the posture they intend to take relative to the financial services industry says they have a keen appreciation of what they are up against. The battle lines are being drawn […]
Read more...Lord Turner, the head of the UK’s Financial Services Authority, is my new hero. He is willing to tell banks to do things that are in the public’s best interest but are singularly unpleasant and costly to the financiers. The fact that what is good for the banksters is increasingly at odds with what is […]
Read more...Astronomers Find World’s Best Astronomical Observing Site Space Fellowship (hat tip reader John D) Lies, damned lies and health care ABC (the Australian one, hat tip reader Skippy) A Drug Maker’s Strategy Revealed New York Times (hat tip reader DoctoRx) Bartiromo Asks 44 y/o Congressman “If Medicare’s So Good, Why Aren’t You On It?!” Talking […]
Read more...A reader who has first hand knowledge of some of the major US financial regulators flagged a CounterPunch article by Pam Martens as the best discussion of the “revolving door” problem that he had ever seen. The interesting thing about this article is that it highlights a problem that is not widely recognized and therefore […]
Read more...Reader John O pointed us to a very good post from the Economic Policy Institute which gives a thorough analysis of recent unemployment data and puts it in a broader historical context. Bottom line: it is not pretty. The fixation with looking for a turn in initial jobless claims as a sign of recovery seems […]
Read more...Dear Patient Readers, We are still debugging the WordPress version of the site. It was taken offline by our webhost for about an hour, much to our consternation. I also learned that the blog was set up to filter spam comments. It seems to be overly zealous in doing so, in that the number tagged […]
Read more...The Guns of August, and Why the Republican Right Was So Adept at Using Them on Health Care Robert Reich Are SpaceX and Tesla Motors the Future of 21st Century Transportation? h+ (hat tip reader David C) Shanghai Index May Drop 25% on Economy, Xie Says Bloomberg Henry Paulson’s Longest Night Todd Purdim, Vanity Fair […]
Read more...Note that while this Bloomberg story discusses that some major hedge funds are skeptical of the theory that the recovery is on, for the most part, it is silent on how they are implementing that view. Recall that even if a trader does make a correct fundamental call, investing successfully on it is another matter. […]
Read more...T. S. Eliot was right. Human beings cannot stand very much reality. As much as I have an appetite for bearish views (I figure the optimist case gets disproportionate air time), the headline of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s latest piece, “Our quarter-century penance is just starting,” is grim even by the standards of the bearish faithful. Evans-Pritchard, […]
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