Microsoft’s bad behavior may finally catch up with it. The EU is now threatening new sorts of punishment for Microsoft’s intransigence and bad faith dealings in what in the US would be called the remedy phase of its antitrust case. To recap the story: in December 2004, Microsoft lost its final appeal on an EU […]
Read more...Another sign of the times: appraisers are routinely prodded to sign off on a higher price than they are inclined to, but arm-twisting or bribery by the seller is becoming pervasive. National Appraisal Survey found that 90% of 1200 participants felt pressured to change their reports, up from 55% in 2003. In addition, there is […]
Read more...An article by Bruce Schneier in Wired Magazine, “How Security Companies Sucker Us With Lemons,” which we found thanks to Slashdot, discusses the work of Nobel Prize winning economist George Akerlof on markets with asymmetrical information: Why are there so many bad security products out there? It’s not just that designing good security is hard […]
Read more...I am normally loath to publish someone else’s post more or less in its entirety, but Brad DeLong’s discussion of some of the more persuasive arguments for investing to arrest global warming is first rate. (And candidly, he references an article by Martin Weitzmen on the Stern Review, the UK report that was the first […]
Read more...Ha. We were suspicious in back in 2005 when Edhec-Risk, an asset management research company, issued a report, “Hedge fund industry: is there a capacity effect?” which examined whether various hedge fund strategies were becoming too crowded for the managers for the managers to earn excess returns. And excess return (meaning earning more than the […]
Read more...Mark Thoma has a good post about the discussion on Hamilton Project director Jason Furman’s health care proposal, which in a nutshell argues that the way to lower health care costs is to have consumers bear more of the costs. That’s the thinking behind Health Care Savings accounts,but Furman tweaks the idea, deeming the original […]
Read more...I always take note when a writer takes a position that is contrary to his usual stance. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution is an intelligent and thoughtful commentator, but hews too closely to free market orthodoxy for my taste. But his review of Maggie Mahar’s Money- Driven Medicine, a hard-hitting critique of health care, American […]
Read more...In her Sunday New York Times column, “‘For Sale’ May Mean ‘You Lose’,” Gretchen Morgenson notes in passing that bankruptcies don’t get as much attention as sexier mergers or IPOs (and it’s confirmed by the dearth of comment on the usual suspect sites in the blogsphere). But there is a lot of money made in […]
Read more...This comment came from a reader in response to our post “The Private Sector Isn’t Always Cheaper/Better (Student Loan Edition)” which discussed the fact that the student loan program administered through banks costs $7 more per $100 loan than loans provided directly, and what an incredibly rich fee/expense level that was for a debt product.I […]
Read more...Ah, but it’s a good rant, colorful and defensibly reasoned, by Angry Bear reader OldVet, “Taking the other side of Trade – what’s free and what’s not.” He makes a valid core observation: free trade hasn’t delivered the goods (at least for the US) that it was alleged to, and that is at least in […]
Read more...Supposedly, the reason that sophisticated investors like pension funds and endowments pay 2% management fees and 20% upside fees (and sometimes more) to hedge funds and private equity funds (and higher-than-index-fund fees for long equity managers) is that they are buying “alpha,” which is the manager’s ability to beat the relevant market. (To be more […]
Read more...We found Yale economist Robert Shiller’s article, “Fears, Not Facts, Drive Global Markets,” thanks to Economist’s View. As much as we agree with Shiller’s conclusion (as author of the book “Irrational Exuberance,” he is considered an expert), that the size and seeming suddenness of market declines can feed on themselves, we don’t agree with the […]
Read more...This article by Robert Franks, a Cornell economist, in today’s New York Times gives several simple but compelling examples of how conservative ideology is internally inconsistent. Conservatives like to claim that keeping government small is pro growth and makes us all better off, at least in a financial sense, by giving us a bigger economic […]
Read more...I trust readers don’t mind the high proportion of Financial Times stories today. You’ve probably figured out that the FT often runs stories that don’t get reported in the US. While the title of this post is a bit of a mouthful, the concept is pretty simple. As you know, the pricing of risky credit […]
Read more...As we’ve noted, Wall Street firms have been investing in various means of profiting from likely future regulation of carbon emissions, particularly carbon trading. A study by Dr. Robert Shapiro, undersecretary of Commerce in the Clinton Administration (which we found thanks to Greg Mankiw’s blog), concludes that carbon taxes would be more effective than emissions […]
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