The question in the headline may seem odd, but consider. Many of the things we want are desires adeptly created by marketing and/or peer influence. It’s easy to recognize in teen agers. Cassandra brings us a more vivid example of how ideas and desires can be influenced: I was simply wondering whether all this is […]
Read more...The total surveillance society program is further along in London than in the US (the prevalence of CCTV, for instance), but it’s still a shocker to see a comment in the Financial Times, which many consider to be the best paper in the English language, advocating Newspeak. For those of you who need a refresher, […]
Read more...Off and on, usually provoked by the release of a new study, the media will turn to the question of happiness and incomes. While the Wall Street Journal has exhibited a tendency to tout research that shows that the rich are happier, the results are far less clear-cut. Once a certain income level has been […]
Read more...One of the shifts in leading edge conventional wisdom is the “cities are cool” sentiment. It’s a lagging indicator, so lagging as to set for a near-term reversal. Mind you, I like cities and particularly like not owning a car, which limits me to particularly densely populated and/or enlightened metropolises. The logic of the new-found […]
Read more...(Submitted by “Cassandra” from Cassanadra Does Tokyo) Considering our location high on the ridgeline above the steep slopes of deflation on one side and the inflationary abyss n the other, and despite our slip (in the last two weeks) seemingly towards deflation, I thought it apt to offer up some non-traditional stores of value given […]
Read more...Jim Grant, who writes and publishes Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, is a rare figure on Wall Street: extraordinarily well versed in financial history, literate, possessed with a Victorian sensibility, which is very much on display here. His essay today in the Wall Street Journal is very much worth reading (and appears to be accessible without […]
Read more...Willem Buiter has a characteristically colorful post, “Time for comrade Paulson to pull the plug on the Fannie and Freddie charade” on the prospect of a Fannie and Freddie rescue. Why is it the British can fulminate better than we Americans do? But Buiter’s beef isn’t the operation of the GSEs but the philosophy behind […]
Read more...Many foreign observers of Japan don’t get past the “lost decade/deflation” headline. They miss the fact that Japan has a robust export sector and continues to run high trade surpluses, despite the supposed difficulty of advanced economies competing with emerging markets. But how has this outcome been achieved? As Michiyo Nakamoto tells us in a […]
Read more...The New York Times has a peculiar story on hedge fund manager John Devaney who managed to lose all his investors’ money. Not 80% or 90%. All. And it wasn’t as if the fund somehow blew up spectacularly over a short period. Devaney froze redemptions a year ago. That begs the question: had he started […]
Read more...Reader Juan provided a well-argued and provocatively-worded critique of so-called market fundamentalism yesterday that I thought would provide grist for thought and discussion. The main argument in favor of less regulated commerce, both domestically, in the form of deregulation, and internationally, via more liberal trade regimes, is that it generates higher growth. Juan argues that […]
Read more...Free Exchange, in Guts or PhD?, contends that that having a PhD in economics is crucial for modern central bankers: When Paul Volcker, Stan Fischer, Jacob Frenkel and Jean-Pierre Roth discussed what central bankers and academics learn from each other at a conference last month, the line that stayed with me was Mr Fischer’s comment […]
Read more...There is a useful, but in some ways disheartening article in today’s New York Times, “Deep Down, We Can’t Fool Even Ourselves” by John Tierney. It’s about how slippery our standards for fairness are. Some key sections: In voting against the Bush tax cut in 2001, Senator John McCain said he “cannot in good conscience […]
Read more...Uwe Reinhardt is a professor at Princeton whose son (the Marine mentioned below) served in Iraq. This piece first appeared in the Princetonian in April; I thank Willem Buiter for reproducing it on his blog. As the Fed and the Treasury once again staff the shovel brigade behind one of Wall Street’s periodic asset-bubble parades […]
Read more...It really is very hard to come up with decent proposals to contend with our highly integrated, international, essential, and not-so-well functioning financial system. While some have developed general guidelines that sound attractive, figuring out how to implement them is quite another matter. For instance, in a recent Financial Times comment, former Treasury secretary Larry […]
Read more...The UK’s Guardian is publishing three extracts from a new book by , Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, “The Gods That Failed: How Blind Faith in Markets Has Cost Us Our Future.” It seemed worthy of note because it illustrates the backlash against the Wall Street types caricatured by Tom Wolfe as “Masters of the […]
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