By Delusional Economics, who is horrified at the state of economic commentary in Australia and is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
The pain in Spain continues with the government releasing the country’s latest budget which has been described by some Spanish economists as ‘the most severe since Franco’
Read more...By Michael Olenick, creator of FindtheFraud, a crowd sourced foreclosure document review system (still in alpha). You can follow him on Twitter at @michael_olenick or read his blog, Seeing Through Data
While researching a HUD database for clues on Thomas Lawler, the frequently-cited foreclosure and heavy-metal loving “housing economist” often cited by the business media, and a favorite of Calculated Risk, I came across background information that raises more questions than it answers.
Starting in 1998 Thomas Lawler held the job of SVP Portfolio Management, SVP Financial Strategy, and SVP of Risk Strategy at Fannie Mae until he unceremoniously left in January, 2006, following an $8 billion financial fraud that occurred under his watch.
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By Delusional Economics, who is horrified at the state of economic commentary in Australia and is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
Back in November last year I posted on my confusion over the jubilation shown by the citizens of Spain as they elected Mariano Rajoy as their new political leader. Mr Rajoy’s strategy during the election campaign was to say very little about what he was actually intending to do to address his country’s financial problems, preferring to simply let the incumbent party fall on its own sword so that he could take the reins. It became obvious soon after the election that, despite his party’s best efforts to dodge questions, the intention was simply to continue with even more austerity.
Read more...The US nominee to lead the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, has come under attack for editing a book called “Dying for Growth.” It apparently performs the cardinal sins of questioning whether a relentless pursuit of growth produces necessarily produces good outcomes and taking issue with neoliberalism. From the Financial Times:
Read more...By Delusional Economics, who is horrified at the state of economic commentary in Australia and is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
Anyone who has been following my European commentary for any length of time will know that I have been running a number of risk themes on Europe due to what I consider to be misguided and one-sided policy which will ultimately be counterproductive.
Read more...I hate beating up on Gillian Tett, because even a writer is clever as she is is ultimately no better than her sources, and she seems to be spending too much time with the wrong sort of technocrats.
Read more...Yves here. This post from MacroBusiness provides a good point of departure, and I’ll provide some comments further down.
By Sell on News, a global macro equities analyst. Cross posted from MacroBusiness
A little known fact about John Maynard Keynes, detailed in Jane Gleeson-White’s book “Double Entry” is that he was responsible for the development of national economic statistics and that he expected them to be aggregated only on a temporary basis.
It was being done for the war effort, and would, he reasoned, not be necessary afterwards. This certainly puts “Keynesianism” in a different perspective, and poses the intriguing question: where would we be without economic statistics?
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Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist who currently heads the Department of Economic Policy at the University of Athens. From 2004 to 2007 he served as an economic advisor to former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou. Yanis writes a popular blog which can be found here. His treatise on economic theory ‘Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World’, co written with Nicholas Theocrakis and Joseph Haveli is available from Amazon.
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington.
Philip Pilkington: Without getting into too much technical detail what is it that you refer to in your book Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World the ‘inherent error’ in all economic theories and models?
Read more...Yves here. This is a short post, but don’t underestimate the significance. The big picture is that Chinese government has been tightening credit to try to lower inflation, with some success, and various commentators have been calling a soft landing outcome. But residential real estate sales took a tumble in November, and electricity use fell in January (although that may be in part due to the Chinese New Year). This is another sign that just as American economists were unduly confident in their ability to fine tune the economy in the 1960s, so too may analysts be overly optimistic about the ability of Chinese leadership to control its economy.
Read more...Wired’s Joel Johnson has written a stunning bit of PR for Foxconn, now-controversial supplier to the consumer electronics industry, duly wrapped in credibility-enhancing guilt over Western materialism.
The article, “1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?” pretends to be about Foxconn’s factories. But Johnson admits he’s a tech toy writer who apparently has no knowledge of manufacturing. Yet he’s remarkably uninhibited in using his fantasies and abject ignorance as a basis for making sweeping generalizations about the Taiwanese powerhouse. For instance:
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
Another day andthe markets remain fixated on whether Greece comes to a “voluntary” arrangement with its creditors. The key word is“voluntary” because the myth of “voluntary compliance has to be sustained so that those deadly credit default swaps avoid being triggered.
But let’s face it: Greece is a pimple. If the rest of the euro zone could cut itlose with a minimum of systemic risk, Athens would have long gone the way of Troy. The real issue is whether the credit default swaps trigger such a huge mess with the counterparties that it creates renewed systemic stress which more than offsets the benefits to the holders of the CDSs.
The more interesting question is: suppose Greece finally does get a deal?
Read more...By Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist who lives in New York City and writes at mathbabe.org
A study recently came out which was entitled “Can stereotype threat explain the gender gap in mathematics performance and achievement?”. One of the authors created and posted a video describing the paper, which you can view here.
As a preview, there seem to be four main points of the paper and the video:
1. The papers on stereotype threat normalize with respect to SAT scores which is bad.
2. Evidence for stereotype threat is therefore weak.
3. We should therefore stop putting all of our resources into combating stereotype threat.
4. We should instead do something easy like combating stereotypes themselves.
I will first address a meta -issue and a blog discussion related to this paper, and then will argue directly against the paper and its conclusions.
Read more...It’s perverse that it takes a Mitt Romney presidential bid to shed some long-overdue harsh light on the private equity industry.
It was not as hard as you might think to do well in the private equity business in the 1990s. Rising equity markets lift all boats, and PE is levered equity. A better test of the ability to deliver value is how they did in more difficult times.
The Financial Times reports on a wee study it commissioned to look into who reaped the fruits of private equity performance. Its findings:
Read more...By Delusional Economics, who is horrified at the state of economic commentary in Australia and is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
Another melee won by the ECB overnight with the LTRO once again pushing sub 3 year sovereign auctions into a “happy place”.
Read more...I don’t know how many times we’ve gone after the “TARP made a profit” bunk, but that topic requires an annoying amount of vigilance (the latest shill was Austan Gooslbee a mere week ago).
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