I recoiled on the first reading of Noam Schrieber’s “The Breakup,” an account of the recently-cooled relationship between JP Morgan and the White House at The New Republic this week. And I don’t like it much better upon a second perusal. So much of the piece is devoted to uncritical recitation of pure JP Morgan […]
Read more...By Glenn Stehle, an engineer who began working in the oil industry in 1974. After a two-year stint with Cities Service Oil Company, he worked for two years for Henry Engineering, a petroleum engineering consulting firm. Upon leaving Henry Engineering he worked as an independent engineering consultant in all facets of the oil and gas […]
Read more...Well, the BP disaster, in particular the intense press coverage of this week, appears to have provided the Administration with some very useful air cover, by diverting public attention from the final rounds in the battle to reform Wall Street. One of the common arguments against the need to create mechanisms to moderate corporate and […]
Read more...Hat tip Francois T:
Read more...Tonight brings an odd pairing: Lord Skidelksy, the highly respected biographer of Keynes, and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who is generally of the Austrian persuasion, both continuing, as each has, to object to the extreme measures in the process of being implemented in the eurozone. Now before you say that they are both Brits, and therefore suspect […]
Read more...Note the fund is to be established over two years, through a combination of dividend cuts and reduction in spending. Moreover, a planned dividend payment for June 21 is being halted, which would appear to be a meaningful concession. From Bloomberg: Svanberg and Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward agreed to set aside $20 billion over […]
Read more...By Gonzalo Lira, a novelist and filmmaker (and economist) currently living in Chile and writing at Gonzalo Lira On the occasion of the BP oil spill disaster, President Obama’s delivered an Oval Office speech last night—a masterpiece of milquetoast faux-outrage. The speech was all about “clean energy” and “ending our dependence on fossil fuels”. Faced […]
Read more...I’m not quite certain how to calibrate journalism American Banker style, but I found this article, “Challenges to Foreclosure Docs Reach a Fever Pitch,” (sadly, subscription only, e-mailed by Chris Whalen), to be both interesting and more than a tad disingenuous. The spin starts with the headline, it’s a doozy. The “challenge to foreclosure documents” […]
Read more...The Brits appear to understand the danger of having an outside and uncontrolled banking sector relative to the size of their economy. So if it’s too hard to attack TBTF directly, the next best is to put (or be able to put) hard constraints on banking. This proposed authority for the Bank of England is […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, in today’s Financial Times, uses modern monetary theory (!), also known as the fiscal balances approach, to explain why calls for fiscal belt tightening are premature. Let’s provide a little background, courtesy Rob Parenteau of the Levy Institute: …if we divide the economy into three sectors – the domestic private (households and firms), […]
Read more...The latest updates on BP, both via Bloomberg. We noted that Rolling Stone had reported that the median of estimates by scientists who has access to the leak data was 55,000 barrels, and there were reasons to take the dire estimates seriously. The latest estimates are allegedly based on a more careful reading of the […]
Read more...Before European readers get upset about the discussion of continued concerns about the eurozone, some of its eager defenders appear to subscribe to an extreme form of indeterminacy. If you recall the famed Schrodinger’s cat, the indeterminacy of the position of an electron is made (somewhat) more comprehensible by a thought experiment in which a […]
Read more...By Satyajit Das, a risk consultant and author of Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2010, FT-Prentice Hall). It Always Ends in the Same Way … No one, including the IMF, seriously believes that the austerity program announced by Greece will work. Argentina had debt […]
Read more...FT Alphaville has a very useful chart and related discussion based on Citigroup research, on the question of whether BP could segregate its operations as a precursor to some sort of “good company/bad company” restructuring. Such a move would no doubt be presented as a way to remove the cloud of uncertainty over BP, but […]
Read more...The House Energy and Commerce Committee chairmen, Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak published the text of a 14 page letter sent today to Tony Hayward, BP’s CEO. The House website not only contains the text of the letter, but also 23 additional documents from BP, Halliburton, Schlumberger, and Transocean. The letter itself provides a damning […]
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