By dint of good fortune, Satyajit Das’ new post at Wilmott (which he has graciously authorized us to reproduce) is on our occasional Sunday beat, and comments on some recent books, the theme being remakes. Enjoy! From Das: Remakes are rarely as good as the original but can sometimes add something, if only a nostalgic […]
Read more...Reader Jason Pl pointed out this post from Jon Taplin, which starts with the less than cheery chart on US durable goods production courtesy Floyd Norris. As you can see, the only growth biz is military: Military contracting procedures means that work will stay with domestic players. So one could take the cynical view that […]
Read more...One of the most remarkable aspects of the success of Wall Street in subordinating the real economy to its wishes and needs is the con job implicit in the application of the word “innovation” to what might more accurately be described as tax evasion, regulatory arbitrage, and chicanery. Martin Mayer once described innovation as “using […]
Read more...Wow, I never thought I’d see the day when a company made a frontal assault on Microsoft’s core business. Google goes where the DOJ failed to penetrate (more accurately, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson managed to steal defeat from the jaws of victory by making some remarks between the decision and the sentencing phase of the […]
Read more...James Kwak, discussing a recent Bernanke speech defending financial innovation and a Ryan Avent post parsing it, underscored Avent’s observation that Bernanke had trouble coming up with an example of the sort that the financial services had in mind these days (ie, novel products making use of derivatives and other risk slicing, dicing, and distribution […]
Read more...There are two schools of thought on financial innovation. One is the mainstream view, repeated faithfully by a compliant media, that financial innovation is really really important and under no circumstances must be threatened. Then we have the Old Fart view, best represented by two men who by any standards ought to have retired by […]
Read more...This was too cool to leave as a mere Antidote du Jour. Is this what geeks do for fun in New Zealand Wales? If the video plays in a herky-jerky fashion, try viewing it here. Enjoy!
Read more...At the risk of losing all cred with tech enthusiast readers, let me use a suggestion (from Dwight) as a point of departure: I thought I would recommend that you both consider adopting Twitter as part of your blogging presence in 2009. Twitter was organized in 2006 and hit 6 million registered users by the […]
Read more...The oil-rich countries of the Middle East have some advantages in pursuing the “green” energy market. First, they have pools of investment capital they can turn to this purpose. Possibly more important than access to money is that the funding sources may be willing to take a longer term horizon and lower returns than US […]
Read more...Folks, am just back from a quick turnaround trip to Vienna, which was educational and enjoyable (although I did not have the time to see a Van Gogh exhibition at the Albertina which reportedly has a large number of rarely-exhibited top quality works). Am on the verge of doing a face plant, so forgive me […]
Read more...The people I know in IT (even though they are in New York. they are doing bleeding-edge work) all professed that they were not affected by the stomach-churning market gyrations of the last six weeks: clients were moving ahead with projects underway, prospects still were keen to meet, contracts were being signed. However, if you […]
Read more...Steve Waldman has a longish and very useful post “I sing the praises of financial innovation” in which he seeks to identify some good and bad financial innovation (I very much support Martin Meyer’s observation that, for the most part, what is called financail innovation is finding new technology that makes legal what was illegal […]
Read more...I’m talking platform leverage – the sort of leverage you can get in a proxy battle by putting a page like this in front of millions of people, many of whom may in fact own your stock, the week before the meeting, for free: Or, the leverage in media you can get by interjecting a […]
Read more...A workmanlike piece in the Financial Times, “A re-emerging market?” by Gillian Tett, Aline Van Duyn and Paul Davies gives a cautiously optimistic outlook for the revival of the securitization market. However, it’s a bit disappointing that the article skips over a couple of key elements. The first is that the explosive growth of securitization […]
Read more...I find this simultaneously impressive and a tad repellant (I’m never clear when informed citizenry slips into prurient interest as far as other people’s disasters are concerned). Hat tip Jojo. The state of California now has Google Maps that track fires, although the site dutifully warns visitors that the information is approximate. We can’t embed […]
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