It must be miserable to be a central banker these days. Not only are they confronted with the worst mess in at least a generation, but too many interested parties, from the financial services industry to politicians and some members of the media, expect them to deliver the impossible, namely status quo ante. The reassessment […]
Read more...The media is typically kind to newly-elected leaders, so now it’s Sarkozy who is getting favorable press treatment. And when we say “burnishing image,” we mean it literally. From the BBC: The French magazine Paris Match touched up a photograph of President Nicolas Sarkozy on his US holiday, making his figure more svelte. Leading news […]
Read more...The Fed’s move on Friday to lower discount rates and its policy shift towards addressing risks to growth has not brought relief to the sector that was in the most distress, the money markets. Panicked action continued Monday, begging the question of what, if anything, the authorities can do. Institutional are fleeing from counterparty risk […]
Read more...A Bloomberg story, in what may be becoming conventional wisdom, charges Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke with making a novice’s error: By lowering the discount rate and issuing a statement conceding threats to the economy, Federal Open Market Committee members effectively ripped up the economic-outlook statement from their Aug. 7 meeting. Some economists describe the […]
Read more...I was planning to go on long form about what the Fed should do, and now they have gone ahead and done it. That means I now have to write something very substantive. More on that later, but here is a roundup of some good posts: Cassandra depicts the credit crunch as a horror movie, […]
Read more...This is priceless. The Wall Street Journal, in a page one story, “How Rating Firms’ Calls Fueled Subprime Mess,” tells us that rating agencies might have had more than a little bit to do with the problems in subprime. This is a new item? A page one news item? It would be a bigger news […]
Read more...The New York Times gave a succinct summary of conventional wisdom on yesterday’s stock market drop: Countrywide’s stark assessment signaled a critical change in the substance and tenor of how housing executives are publicly describing the market. Just a couple of months ago, some executives were predicting a relatively quick recovery and saying that most […]
Read more...In the wake of Murdoch succeeding in his bid for the Wall Street Journal, this review by Russell Baker, “Goodbye to Newspapers?” on two books describing the decline of the newspaper, and its implications for the public, is aptly timed. Not surprisingly, Baker sees the corporate, as opposed to family, ownership, as a major culprit. […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal, in “Barclays Spars Over Its Losses at Bear Stearns,” discusses how Barclays is wrangling with Bear over what may be as much as $400 million in losses related to the failure of its two hedge funds run by Ralph Cioffi. The article is remarkably unclear as to what exactly the disputes […]
Read more...MarketWatch reports tonight that this year is showing the smallest year-to-year increase in retail drug prices since 1995. I happened to catch a buddy who is an FDA lawyer/biomedical engineer and before that, worked for the National Institutes of Health and one of Big Pharmas. She attributes the slowdown in price increases to three things […]
Read more...Disclosure: I used to be a huge fan of the Economist, because it was well written, broad ranging, intelligently non-partisan, and (at least politically) often contrarian. But ever since the start of the Bush era, it has taken a marked shift to the right, in both its political and economic coverage. Take this story from […]
Read more...I continue to be amazed at how the use of language has gotten skewed in America. “Conservative” and “liberal” were once descriptive (or at least the degree to which they were pejorative depended on who was using the term). Today, “conservative” means “responsible” and “liberal” is “out to get the rich and destroy the economy.” […]
Read more...Kuwait had a closed door session to discuss its reserves with Parliament before reaffirming the country’s proven oil reserves at 100 billion barrels. As Xinhua points out, this is a odd and troubling set of events. Parliament had refused to pass the budget, which shows a large deficit, unless the oil ministry came clean with […]
Read more...A Canadian study, “Food Web–Specific Biomagnification of Persistent Organic Pollutants,” published in Science Magazine, identifies a new class of chemicals that pose a potential threat to human health. This conclusion results from a more fundamental insight: the traditional method of looking at bioaccumulation did so by studying marine life. However, air-breathing creatures discharge toxins differently […]
Read more...From the Wall Street Journal: Standard & Poor’s lowered ratings on 498 bonds backed by subprime home loans, comprising the vast majority of the 612 bonds that it earlier this week said it was reviewing for downgrades. The ratings company also said the 612 bonds were originally worth $7.35 billion, not the $12 billion it […]
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