Some readers who were unable to come to the Manhattan bookstore event earlier this year asked for a rain date. Unfortunately, bookstores don’t work that way (despite the fact that the session was standing room only) and given the vagaries of my schedule, the best fallback is a meeting in a public venue. So if […]
Read more...‘Terror bird’ was prize fighter BBC Canadian pot growers use wild bears to guard stash Raw Story Cigarette smoke causes harmful changes in the lungs even at the lowest levels PhysOrg The Brain: What Happens to a Linebacker’s Neurons? Discovery Australian election on knife edge BBC Rennen um Rohstoffe: Forscher entdecken großes Ölfeld in Afghanistan […]
Read more...A story by Ellen Brown gives a good summary of how the widespread use of a national electronic mortgage registry called MERS, designed to save mortgage securitizers the cost and bother of recording mortgages at the local courthouse, is backfiring spectacularly. Although in a industry as large and diverse as the mortgage industry, one has […]
Read more...→ Rajiv Sethi Back in 1980, Avraham Beja and Barry Goldman published a theoretical paper in the Journal of Finance that explored the manner in which the composition of trading strategies in an asset market affects the volatility of prices. Their main insight was that if the prevalence of momentum based strategies was too large […]
Read more...This is a particularly clear and succinct explanation of the role of Treasury auctions in monetary operations at Pragmatic Capitalism (hat tip BondSquawk), in a post I urge you to read in its entirety, “The Myth of the Great Bond “Bubble.” The government bond market is merely a monetary tool that the central bank utilizes […]
Read more...→ Washington’s Blog Few people in the world know more about oil drilling disasters than Dr. Robert Bea. Bea teaches engineering at the University of California Berkeley, and has 55 years of experience in engineering and management of design, construction, maintenance, operation, and decommissioning of engineered systems including offshore platforms, pipelines and floating facilities. Bea […]
Read more...As readers may know, Marshall Auerback is a portfolio manager and strategist, as well as a fellow of the Roosevelt Institute; David Franklin is a research analyst at Sprott Asset Management. Click here to view the segment. Enjoy!
Read more...The Eyes Have It: Why Iris Scanning Rules Fast Company (hat tip reader Jonathan B) AP fact check: Islam ‘already part of WTC neighborhood’ Raw Story Who will stand up to the GOP’s war on Islam? Gene Lyons, Salon Why the Suicide Rate Among Veterans Is Climbing Big Think EFF-ing Up Streetwise Professor How Much […]
Read more...Readers may wonder why I haven’t written about my visit on Monday to the Treasury, but truth be told, I headed out afterward with Mike Konczal and Steve Waldman to get a drink, and we all looked at each other quizzically. I said something along the lines of “I’m not certain there is anything to […]
Read more...One of the minor aspects of the econoblogger session with the Treasury on Monday (more on that shortly) is that several of the invitees said something along the lines of, “You guys did a great job in the crisis.” What is disconcerting is how this view has now become conventional wisdom, despite the panicked Fed […]
Read more...Full disclosure: I’ve known Amar Bhide for roughly 25 years (we both worked on the Citibank account at McKinsey, albeit never on the same project) and although we correspond only occasionally, I continue to regard his as a particularly keen observer and original thinker. He was briefly a proprietary trader, then an associate professor at […]
Read more...‘No human link’ to mammoth demise BBC United States’ North-South Achievement Gap Racial Reality Blog (hat tip reader Paul S). Wow, this is wild. Attosecond real-time Observation of a Quantum Hole analytica-world (hat tip reader Skippy) Report: Nearly 80 Percent of Spilled Oil Still Threatens Gulf Discovery. In other words, your government is lying to […]
Read more...When I was on C-SPAN the weekend before last, I got a call I didn’t quite know how to field. It was from someone who by his accent was obviously Indian. He claimed that Indians represented 35% of the managers in American companies, and that American visa restrictions meant that they were all going to […]
Read more...It is truly astonishing to watch how determined the economics orthodoxy is to defend its inexcusable, economy-wrecking performance in the runup to the financial crisis. Most people who preside over disasters, say from a boating accident or the failure of a venture, spend considerable amounts of time in review of what happened and self-recrimination. Yet […]
Read more...A fund manager who will go unnamed mentioned to me that he is putting clients into bank stocks because they are trading at or below book value. Now of course, individual stocks can and do always outperform the outlook for their sector, so there are no doubt particular banks whose stocks are cheap right now. […]
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