Yours truly just got in from London. Truth be told, I had a good time being a volcano refugee. My host Richard Smith was very gracious and accommodating (as in he didn’t mind my blogging a fair bit, and most important, did not seem at all bothered by the extended stay), and we did get out and putter around the city a bit.
Forgive the brief posts, managed not to sleep on flight back, with the results being I am now so tired I am having difficulty reading.
Blue stork surprises German villagers BBC
Top matador loses 17 pints of blood following bull goring Telegraph
Reputational Risk: In Goldman Sachs We Trust Chris Whalen
The Leading Indicator of Repurchase Risk Losses? Audited By KPMG Francine McKenna
For Greece’s Economy, Geography Was Destiny Robert Kaplan, New York Times (hat tip reader Don B)
Wrangling with the Wild Bulls Andy Xie Caing (hat tip reader Don B). Key sentence: “Recent statistics, though far from accurate, unambiguously show an overheating Chinese economy as well as a speculative bubble.”
Antidote du jour:
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er, can you fix the andy xie link (its not there) welcome back!
Here is a link to the Andy Xie article:
http://english.caing.com/2010-04-21/100137263.html
See LA Times article as further evidence on china housing market bubble
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-china-realestate-20100426,0,3213754,full.story
Is that Telegraph article about the matador a cryptic warning to those who are trying to short the US stock market?
Yves has left the country.
Haste ye back.
Thanks! Enjoyed meeting you in St. James’!
Would love an excuse to go back….there’s the wee matter of travel expenses (particularly given that my knee does not take well to limited legroom on long flights). A conference or speaking gig is the most obvious remedy (hint hint….)
Travel expenses can be greatly reduced if you schedule around Icelandic eruptions and major terrorist attacks (9/11 was the last time I remember people unable to fly back to the US).
If you have a place to crash, these disruptions are merely disruptive. To be crass, with my bum knee (a trainer did me in, no joke), I pretty much need to ride in the front of the bus on long haul flights.
Welcome home.
I don’t have a subscription to Whalen’s IRA so am unable to follow their complete perspective on matters, but the article “In Goldman Sachs We Trust” seems to make a bit of a leap in assuming that Paulson & Co (and other participants) did nothing wrong. As a result, there’s a rather large gap between what is being said in this article versus those of people like William Black. Am I missing something?
Geofizz,
You don’t need a subscription to IRA to read the current offering, but you do to read its archives.
TYVM Yves! I’m plugged in now, but regret having not been before (non-finance science type here).
Welcome Back to USofA by the way!
RE: For Greece’s Economy, Geography was Destiny:
If economy is destiny, then I guess being a northern European country is bad, since the “I” in PIGS is Ireland, not Italy.
I thought many people were spelling it PIIGS these days, to include Ireland and Italy.
FWIW I’m also a bit skeptical of the “geography is destiny” argument.
It’s looks like the elephant’s punishment is to keep performing his Sisphean task, god’s command or god’s work as he calls it, of rolling one bad loan over another (the fake log is just a metaphor).
Do hope you will give this latest piece by the often reliable Gillian Tett one of your inimitable debunkings:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a9da1aa4-508b-11df-bc86-00144feab49a.html
Quite extraordinarily supine stuff, to my mind.
GT re the ratings agencies: “…there is little suggestion that rating officials were engaged in any deliberate malfeasance.” No comment. No FT.
GT re the investment banks: “…what went wrong in finance was fundamentally structural, as an entire system spun out of control…the financial system was so separated into silos that its practitioners lost any common sense.” A tragic loss of banker agency then, was it? The silo made me do it.
Between this sort of stuff and all of the warmongering about the “Iran nuclear threat” one must wonder whether the FT has once and for all completely lost the plot.
I spend less and less time reading it.
Immigration legislation going through Congress mandates biometric Social Security cards. Libertarians , for one, should be up in literary arms over this.
That’s a lot of blood, 17 pints.
It amazes me that India has not boycotted or worse, declared a non-violent war on Spain and Mexico for their bloody bull fights. I guess it’s OK as long as they are not cow fights.
Hindus do not consider theirs to be a universal religion.
Contrast all religions springing from Abraham.
Those say: “My way or the highway that is war.”.
But Hindus say “My way is mine: and thy way is thine.”
No proselytizing.
Hence no war with non-Hindu others, for doing non-hindu things.
If it’s not inconvenient to build nuclear bombs, in a country with the world’s largest non-warring Hindu population, as a deterrent against atheistic or monotheistic aggression, I don’t think it’s beneath them to engage in some kind of non-violent war, for example, verbal war, with Spain or Mexico about bullfights, unless, as I mentioned, they are more concerned about cow fights than bull fights.