Ever since we learned that the perilous state of the oceans is a top 25 underreported story, we decided to our bit to rectify that by giving articles on the state of the seas more prominence. At current fishing rates, fish stocks will collapse by 2050. But why hasn’t the invisible hand interceded? If fish […]
Read more...I’m a bit late to get to this item, a predictably good article by the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf on Nouriel Roubini’s observations about why Asian countries became so willing to finance our deficits (short answer: they decided to keep their currencies cheap after the 1997 emerging markets crisis) and whether this situation is sustainable […]
Read more...Unlike its US counterparts, the Financial Times has consistently been on top of the various unsavory elements of the credit market bubble: the near disappearance of risk premia, the growth of leverage on leverage, the lack of investor sophistication. A piece by John Plender does a very good job of connecting some of the dots […]
Read more...One of the funny things about slow motion train wrecks in the financial arena is that even when they are painfully obvious, they can be so long in coming that the Cassandras come to look like idiots, or worse, throw in the towel. Remember the dot com era. Anyone with an iota of common sense […]
Read more...The question of systemic risk, that is, the possibility of a generalized failure of the financial system, such as a stock market crash, is something that regulators think about a great deal and quite deliberately discuss a good bit less, since fear becomes a driving element in any market panic. The reason for the heightened […]
Read more...We comment only intermittently on the oil scene (there are only so many hours in the day), but the health and remaining productive capacity of the world’s major oil fields is a vital economic and strategic issue. Yet the big producers provide little information, so experts try to extrapolate from the data points they possess. […]
Read more...That’s the bottom line of a smart and scary bit of analysis by Michael Shedlock of “Mish’s Global Trend Analysis.” And it confirms, even more dramatically than we imagined, the large and growing gap between the Fed’s reputation and its real power. The Fed is a close cousin to the Wizard of Oz. It hides […]
Read more...The third installment of this year’s series of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is out, this one focusing on the level of corrective measures needed to counteract climate change and their likely cost. As we reported earlier (“Third IPCC Report: Compromised on Arrival“), each successive report is more and more politicized. This […]
Read more...Jeremy Grantham of GMO Investments (the G in GMO stands for Gratham), a very well regarded and long standing investment manager (the firm runs over $140 billion, much of it in equities). He is skilled in the black art of modelling and at the peak of the dot com bubble, correctly called how far the […]
Read more...Australian economist John Quiggin posted a high level event chart of the how Seriously Bad scenarios might play themselves out (from a talk by sustainability expert Chris Moran) and what the policy response might be. It includes probability estimates from 80 students. However, as the chart shows, the rational calculus doesn’t bode well for forestalling […]
Read more...Now and again, the press has reported on the disappearance of large numbers of bees, and the potentially dire implications, since a large proportion of US agricultural pollination depends on the efforts of bees brought in by beekeepers. Nattering Naybob gave us a disheartening reminder as well as a bit of useful background, which inspired […]
Read more...Now and again, the press has reported on the disappearance of large numbers of bees, and the potentially dire implications, since a large proportion of US agricultural pollination depends on the efforts of bees brought in by beekeepers. Nattering Naybob gave us a disheartening reminder as well as a bit of useful background, which inspired […]
Read more...There are two reasons this item, picked up in Felix Salmon’s blog, is noteworthy. The first is that investment banks happily extending their balance sheets to help get M&A transactions done is a classic sign of the end of a cycle. The second is that Salmon, who is vastly more sanguine about the state of […]
Read more...This story in today’s Financial Times, “As America falters, policymakers must look ahead,” is remarkable because, as far as I can tell, it is the first time a prominent economist has come out and said the unwinding of the housing bubble is likely to have nasty consequences (actually, take that back, Paul Krugman had a […]
Read more...The post below is from a reader, DS. He focuses on the fact that the Fed has basically admitted that its powers are limited due to the extent of financial activity that takes place outside its purview (the Fed supervises federally-chartered banks; securities firms, which are regulated by the SEC and hedge funds, which are […]
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