Yearly Archives: 2011

EuroCrisis Spotlight Moves From Greece to Italy

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8875444/France-cuts-frantically-as-Italy-nears-debt-spiral.html

Thanks! Met Fourth Target, On to the Fifth

Thanks to our generous and responsive readers, we met our fourth target (blog support so we can take a real vacation) late Monday evening. As of midnight EST, we hit 470 donors out of our target of 750. We also had a fund manager approach us about paying a research fee quarterly, as it does to some independent analysts. Quite a few readers told us after the crisis that our commentary helped them escape losses, and some investors also said NC was responsible for some profitable trades. And as much as our focus post the implosion has shifted to covering the failure to implement meaningful reforms, our ongoing coverage of current developments and underlying trends in the markets and the economy is still valuable to investors small and large.

Our fifth target is a grab bag of site enhancements.

Chinese bubble bursting: A probable non-event

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland In waking a tiger, use a long stick. – Mao Tse-tung Well, it looks like it could finally be happening. The Chinese housing bubble could well be bursting right before our eyes. The bubble has long been present for all to see, with news […]

The money scoreboard

I am going to fill in a few posts for Yves while she is away on conference. Here’s one that is a thought piece I wrote last week at Credit Writedowns. It is a mental model of the economy I am toying with based on some comments the modern monetary theory folks have made to […]

Links 11/7/11

Matt Stoller: 50 State Settlement Chatter – $65 Million of Fundraising and the Kamala Harris Network

This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. Over 365 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate on our kickoff post.

By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris is one of the key players involved in the 50 state negotiations. The state was the seat of a good proportion of mortgage fraud nationally, and the California Attorney General’s office is one of the only state AG offices with enough legal resources to impact the national housing framework. Understanding how she thinks about politics matters, because this is how critical decisions are made. Harris’s decision-making seems to be driven by personal connections and fundraising networks. This is not at all unusual, but it does contrast a bit with other types of public servants, who often see their job as serving the law itself. So what do her personal connections and fundraising networks look like?

Wow! Met Our Third Target, On to the Fourth!

I’m in the air on the way to the AmeriCatalyst concerence in Austin on mortgages and securitization, where I am speaking on two panels, the keynote (!) and the final one on litigation. Adam Levitin is also on the second panel, and I was looking forward to having his help in fighting the defenders of the “nothing to see here, move right along” school of thought, but he is now one of the moderators. So I have to go it alone. Wish me luck.

We were just short of meeting the the third target (nice ex-post facto honoraria to our loyal guest bloggers) when I left NYC, and we’ve met it now, so thanks for your great response! As of 4:30 PM EST, 300 of you of our goal of 750 have generously contributed.

We are now on our way to meeting our next target, which is a purely selfish one: I want a real vacation!

Philip Pilkington: Naked Capitalism – A Rare Bird

This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. Over 260 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate on our kickoff post.

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland

We live at a strange moment in history. Everything has changed. The old ideologies have been disgraced and the old institutions lie in ruins. But the mainstream media and educational institutions have not yet come to terms with this. They continue to frame everything within the old ideas and narratives.

The result is confusion on a mass scale.

Links 11/6/11

Is Greece About to Derail the Bailout Yet Again?

This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. Over 170 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate on our kickoff post.

Germany found it hard to conquer and control Greece in World War II. History seems to be repeating itself.

Thanks! Met Our Second Fundraising Target, On to the Third

Dear readers, if you are a weekday only reader or sensibly were off the grid yesterday, please visit our kickoff post where we tell you what we hope to accomplish with our fundraiser.

I really appreciate the speedy and generous responses. It was a bit distracting yesterday, in a good way, to see all the PayPal notifications, “Check is in the mail” messages (the kickoff post gives you the sordid details), and updates from James B., who is processing non-PayPal credit card donations via this link.

Our first target was $4700 for upgrading both the site hosting and the level of site support. You met that in 6 hours. Our next target was $10,500 for travel, which will include travel expenses for some members of our core team (for instance, Andrew Dittmer, who was of great help on ECONNED and is going to be coming from Boston to NYC periodically to work on one of the OWS committees. He also did security duty at Zuccotti Park last night). We met the second target by midnight. We are up to 159 donors, and our target for the week is 750 (some of our donors thus far have given us quite sizable contributions, but we also value the participation of those of you who are on limited budgets but still want to say thanks).

The third target is…

“When Offshoring Backfires”

This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. Over 175 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate on our kickoff post.

Readers may know that I have strong feelings about offshoring. There is plenty of evidence that the case for offshoring and outsourcing are considerably overdone. First, direct factory labor is only a small part of the total wholesale cost of manufactured goods, typically 10% to 15%. While offshoring clearly reduces those costs, there are offsets: increased managerial/coordination cost, greater transport and inventory financing costs. I’ve had some executives in different lines of business tell me their company decided to outsource/offshore despite the fact that the business case was not compelling. Second, offshoring increases risk, particularly the risk of getting stuck with inventory you can’t sell.

This VoxEU article does a nice job of looking at the tradeoffs between cost savings and customer responsiveness.