I nearly fell off my chair. Ben Stein’s column this week, “What McCain Could Do About Taxes,” is sensible and vastly more tightly written and argued than his previous work. No free association or gratuitous name-dropping, no leaps of logic, no wishful thinking. More shocking, not only does he take issue with the Republican party […]
Read more...In “States and Cities Start Rebelling on Bond Ratings,” the New York Times attempts to make the case that municipalities can lead a revolt against Wall Street: Does Wall Street underrate Main Street? A growing number of states and cities say yes. If they are right, billions of taxpayers’ dollars — money that could be […]
Read more...Ben Stein gives us another installment of his usual sloppy thinking. In his latest offering, “Exxon Mobil Needs a Hug,” he declares: After all, Big Oil is big us. And we need us. Since I don’t consider myself Big Oil, and I imagine most readers would object to being considered to be Big Oil, all […]
Read more...The New York Times has an odd story today, “Is a Lean Economy Turning Mean?” which discusses how conditions for workers have become dire. New jobs are scarce, and many of the ones out there don’t pay as well as what employees got in previous roles. Hello, downward mobility. What makes the piece peculiar is […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal reports today in “U.S. Pushes Sovereign Funds To Open to Outside Scrutiny,” that the US Treasury Department talking to two large sovereign wealth funds, Singapore’s Temasek and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, as the first steps in a process to “”draft rules to oversee the behavior of such funds, without discouraging […]
Read more...The headline above comes from the UK’s Independent. I could have picked number of variants (BBC, “Anti-depressants ‘of little use‘,” Financial Times, “Antidepressants ‘have no impact‘”), but what is interesting is that as of this hour, this study, published by the University of Hull, is getting MSM coverage solely in the UK and Commonwealth countries. […]
Read more...From time to time, there are marked disparities in how events are reported in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. In the overwhelming majority of times, it’s the Journal’s reporting that’s deficient. Today’s sighting fits the classic pattern. The difference in headlines says it all. The Journal’s is: “German Bank Blames UBS for […]
Read more...Full disclosure: I am no fan of the Wall Street Journal’s editorials: in fact, I’ve commented on the liberties they often take with facts. But when they are on a pet peeve, they can become so overwrought that the level of agitation alone is amusing. And just because they are often wrong doesn’t mean they […]
Read more...We were one of the first to say that former Citigroup Charles Prince would come to regret his end-of-the-cycle-is-nigh comment initially reported in the Financial Times: Chuck Prince on Monday dismissed fears that the music was about to stop for the cheap credit-fuelled buy-out boom, saying Citigroup was “still dancing.” We are so bold as […]
Read more...One robin does not make a spring, but this front page Wall Street Journal article, “High-Interest Lenders Tap Elderly, Disabled,” is a real surprise. It’s not at all the sort of story one expects to see in the Journal, and comes one day after a very favorable piece on Michelle Obama. Is Murdoch having a […]
Read more...We didn’t think much of the New Hope Alliance, the program brokered by the Treasury Department to rescue subprime borrowers facing resets. The program’s criteria targeted those who were already paying fairly high initial interest rates with very little to no equity in their house at the time of closing. In other words, this group […]
Read more...Readers may have noticed that this site has gotten what one can most politely call visually busy. I’m not happy with the awkward adolescent ad-cluttered look. That in turn leads to a broader discussion of aesthetics, not just in terms of appearance but also positioning. The visual issue is pretty obvious: I’d like this to […]
Read more...This story, reporting on work by an international group published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warned that human induced change could push the climate to certain tipping point as early as the current century. This research is getting little coverage in the US. According to a search in Google News, it […]
Read more...I am having a Dean Baker moment, although I suspect Baker will have even more fun with the front page New York Times article bearing the headline above. This is how the story starts: China’s latest export is inflation. After falling for years, prices of Chinese goods sold in the United States have risen for […]
Read more...While there was not much in the way of new developments on the bond insurer front on Tuesday, the media chatter features some interesting cross currents. On the one hand, the Financial Times, which had some relatively upbeat coverage the day before, had an article on the impressively large level of short interest in the […]
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