A question for readers: in many lines of commerce, large firms often enjoy significant cost and/or revenue advantages relative to smaller players. Over time, these industries tend to evolve to a format where many of the most successful enterprises are very large organizations. These firms typically wield considerable power relative to players smaller than they […]
Read more...The Jackson Hole conference starting today is expected to include a talk by Ben Bernanke on the benefits and costs of further monetary easing, which in ZIRP-land means quantitative easing. Gavyn Davies put up a good short list of arguments made against QE at the Financial Times, and most do not look terribly persuasive. One […]
Read more...Normally, I don’t report on anecdotes from my immediate circle, but a set of conversations in less than a 24 hour period suggests that even those comparatively unaffected by the crisis are bracing themselves for the possibility of sudden, large-scale, adverse changes. And that sort of gnawing worry seems to be growing in New York […]
Read more...Frankly, now that financial markets reform has moved from the Congressional shadowboxing stage to the arm-wrestling in smoke-filled room sort-out-the-details-that-matter stage, the retreat from public scrutiny has, of course, served as a cover for further watering down of measures that were not very strong to begin with. Yesterday we noted that major companies were outraged […]
Read more...I think we all know the answer to the question in the headline, courtesy F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The rich are different than you and me.” And the fact that they have more money means their defaults are couched as pure business decisions. But mere homeowners, told to view their house as an investment, are now […]
Read more...Boy, when you think you’ve seen the worst in utterly shameless, self serving tripe, someone manages to outdo it. Admittedly, it’s awfully hard to beat Steve Schwarzmann’s recent one-two punch of utter canard wrapped in tasteless hyperbole, that of Obama proposals that private equity kingpins pay taxes on what is really the fruits of their […]
Read more...Yves here. We were skeptical of derivatives reform efforts as inadequate to deal with the product that needed to be reined in, credit default swaps, and subject to evisceration depending on how various details were sorted out. And if the types of contracts that wind up being covered are reasonably broad, the new derivatives clearinghouse […]
Read more...Beijing-based fiance professor and commentator Michael Pettis gives a typically sobering outlook in a Financial Times comment today, seeing the seemingly irresistible force of trade surplus countries’ resistance to shifting towards more internal generated demand colliding with the immovable object of trade deficit countries’ inability to tolerate the high unemployment rates that result for a […]
Read more...John Plender in his comment at the Financial Times, “Great dangers attend the rise and fall of great powers,” does a fine job given the space constraints of discussing the fraught process of changes in global economic and political leadership. I thought it would be useful to quote Plender at length, with some additional observations, […]
Read more...One of the minor aspects of the econoblogger session with the Treasury on Monday (more on that shortly) is that several of the invitees said something along the lines of, “You guys did a great job in the crisis.” What is disconcerting is how this view has now become conventional wisdom, despite the panicked Fed […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and fund manager who writes at New Deal 2.0 Hint: it’s not Republicans. Social Security remains one of the greatest achievements of the Democratic Party since its creation 75 years ago. Although Republicans have historically fulminated against the program (Ronald Reagan once likened it as something akin to “socialism”), […]
Read more...Even though a strike at a Honda factory and suicides at Foxconn garnered world wide attention and led to significant pay increases, at this remove, the hubub about them seemed overdone (“China faces wave of strikes after Foxconn pay rise“). China is still very much an authoritarian country, the Honda strike was approved officially, and […]
Read more...As we’ve noted on this blog, the Administration efforts to punish so-called strategic defaulters seem hopelessly misguided. First, it’s well nigh impossible to tell with simple screens who really could afford their house longer term (ie people who default suddenly, as opposed to wobble in and out of being current on their mortgage before folding, […]
Read more...The latest stunt from the Obama Administration on the housing front is a peculiar bit of theatrics at the margin. As Bloomberg reports: The Obama administration will offer $1 billion in zero-interest loans to help homeowners who’ve lost income avoid foreclosure as part of $3 billion in additional aid targeting economically distressed areas. The Department […]
Read more...If all politicians were this entertaining, the public might start sitting up and taking notice of what happens in DC.
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