While we’re have a cliche fest, an ill wind blows nobody good, and it looks like that Bear Stearns hedge fund debacle had some unexpected upside, namely, producing a flight to quality, meaning Treasuries, sparking a rally. I’m sure you could have said the same of past crises (just for starters, the 1997 emerging markets […]
Read more...OK, schizophrenia is a bit too strong a word, but it got your attention, right? “Dissonance” is closer to the mark, and differing points of view in a plugged-in, market-savvy paper like the Financial Times is an interesting sight to behold. Both stories address the same general topic, namely, whether the current mess in subprimes […]
Read more...Either it’s a horribly slow news day, or the Bloomberg people are besotted with the Bear Stearns story. I imagine journalists enjoy schaudenfreude as much as the next guy. From late afternoon until now, even after the Asian markets have opened, the top story on its “Breaking News” section is, “Bear Stearns Enlists Mortgage Chief […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal, in “Bear’s Stock is Acting Like It’s Name,” adds surprisingly little of substance to what’s already been reported on Bloomberg (see here and here), but the story’s downer tone is the last thing Bear needs at this juncture. One element that has been missing from the mot press coverage but picked […]
Read more...Bloomberg is keeping up a rapid pace of stories on the Bear Stearns hedge funds. Bear has apparently found some buyers for the assets of its High-Grade Structured Credit Leveraged Fund, the one for which it put in place a secured credit facility to permit an orderly workout. This was not an official announcement by […]
Read more...We had wanted to write about the role of models and more important, model assumptions in the ongoing Bear Stearns hedge fund debacle, and Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times, in her story, “When Models Misbehave,” provided some useful intelligence. With all due respect to Morgenson, while she touches on some dimensions of the […]
Read more...In case you missed it, the US stock market was rattled by the continuing aftershocks of the Bear Stearns subprime-related hedge fund fallout, with the Dow down 185, and Bear itself was down in line with the Dow (both fell 1.4%, although Bear was up slightly in the aftermarket at this hour). Now the odd […]
Read more...A more accurate title might be “The Wall Street Journal Goes Out of Its Way to Demonize Chavez.” Narrowly speaking, Venezuela (except perhaps its actions as an OPEC member) are outside the beat of this blog. However, we do take a keen interest in the biases in the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, and this one […]
Read more...We have been saying for some time that a housing recovery was quite a way off, and official opinion has finally caught up with our views (or more accurately, has decided to acknowledge obvious but unpleasant reality). The Weekend Wall Street Journal reports in a page one story, “Economists See Housing Slump Enduring Longer.” The […]
Read more...As we have said before, the Wall Street Journal’s news reporting isn’t all its cracked up to be. One pattern we’ve noticed is a tendency to put a positive spin on economic news. Now we’ve detected a second: failing to report when powerful foreign interests jerk America’s chain. When the US said that it would […]
Read more...The government that told us that there were WMD in Iraq has also told us that payrolls increased by 157,000 in May. We’ve pointed out before that the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s monthly job report has a well established history of being unreliable and overstated. The Business Employment Dynamics report, which is far more detailed […]
Read more...For those who don’t know about him, Jim Grant of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer has been a long standing and highly regarded advocate of probity, common sense, and historical memory. Of course, that means he is completely out of fashion. But Grant has a loyal following and even those who differ with his skeptical outlook […]
Read more...We’ve noted more than once that quite a few government statistics near and dear to analysts and investors, such as GDP, inflation, and employment growth, are pretty iffy. So you don’t think we are unfairly singling out the government, some measures produced by the private sector are also questionable. A prime example is foreclosure statistics, […]
Read more...Earlier this month, the national science academies of the G8 plus those of China, India, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, and India, issued a strongly worded joint statement about global warming and energy usage. Let us stress that it is pretty much unheard of for this many independent science bodies to agree on such an unequivocal […]
Read more...I have spent the entire long weekend avoiding dealing with this article by David Ranson and Penny Russell, “Does the Fed Matter?” in Friday’s Wall Street Journal. The reason is that if I got going, there is so much in it that is off beam, misleading, or just plain wrong that it would be hard […]
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