I’m of two minds about taking up this theme, since stating what ought to be obvious but is nevertheless unpleasant and inconvenient is apt to get one branded as lunatic fringe. Access journalism has created what is in many respects a controlled press. And that matters because people are far more suggestible than most of […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. In the 1987 movie classic Wall Street, the sinister protagonist Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas gives this famous quote: In the last seven deals that I’ve been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you. I […]
Read more...Quelle horreur, some smart people are starting to question whether banking serves a redeeming social function. Of course, in the abstract, it does. Banking (or more accurately, extending credit) is essential for commerce. But any essential support function, if it overpriced in relationship to its true value, becomes a drag on the productive economy. And […]
Read more...Deflation, anyone? One of the staples of Japan’s lost now two decades has been an unrelenting squeeze on worker wages and work conditions. New graduates used to get full time jobs. Now man are “freeters” in a sort of temp purgatory. And given how important social networks are in Japan, the lack of a real […]
Read more...Small businesses have fair weather friends. Policymakers love to extol entrepreneurship. And in the last business cycle, even in the upswing, large corporations shed jobs while mid-sized and particularly small businesses added them. But when things get ugly, the best connected players get the breaks, and the little guy is left out in the cold. […]
Read more...I have a weakness for seeing movies in theaters; the home variety, even with the super large screens, is just not the same. And it has been so long since I have seen a movie that all the trailers looked good to me (well, I must confess I like trailers. The tacky soda and car […]
Read more...Even though there has been an increasing level of revolutionary saber-rattling in comments, it’s hard to see what the outlet for the anger against the banking industry will be. The brief surge of letter-writing, e-mails, and calls to Congressmen to forestall the TARP proved useless. But Americans don’t go to the barricades or do general […]
Read more...Um, this isn’t exactly consistent with the recovery story. From MarketWatch: Employers’ hiring plans for the upcoming fourth quarter dropped to their lowest level in the history of Manpower’s Employment Outlook Survey, which started in 1962. A net -3% of employers said they’ll hire in the fourth quarter, down from -2% in the third quarter, […]
Read more...The headline statistic, which comes out of a study by the non-partisan California Budget Project, in isolation sounds worse than it is (which is not to say that this factoid is good, mind you). Labor force participation before the downturn was in the 66%ish range, so this is a meaningful decline (assuming California levels are […]
Read more...As much as commentators are trying to put a happy face on recent data releases showing that job losses are slowing, it still means that fewer people are working. Moreover, one element of the poor jobs environment that it not getting enough play is the way wages are deteriorating. Some who have full-time work have […]
Read more...By Andrew Kaplan, a hedge fund manager: It has become fashionable among equities managers of the bullish persuasion to argue that a strong recovery in GDP will occur in 2010 because the “structural adjustment period” of moving back to a more normal savings rate has been completed. We’ve gone from a savings rate of barely […]
Read more...Reader Alex C sent a link to an article in the Guardian by Mark Weisbrot in which he surveys some recent findings aht disproved cherished myths about the US economy. Two are related to the widely-held fantasy that America is a land of dynamic entrepreneurship. In fact, a recent study found that the US ranks […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. Yves said her piece about the new affordable FHFA program to allow home ‘owners’ in negative equity to stay in their homes. And I had a crack at it yesterday as well. But, I have some thoughts to run by you here using a specific example of an […]
Read more...A paradox arises to the extent that it is true that the market is dependent on normative underpinning (to provide the pre-contractural foundations such as trust, cooperation, and honesty) which all contractural relations require: The more people accept the neoclasical paradigm as a guide for their behavior, the more the ability to sustain a market […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. This morning I was reading Simon Johnson’s excellent post “President Obama’s Regulatory Reforms Announcement: A Viewer’s Guide” about what Barack Obama should say when he makes his regulatory reform pitch today at 12:30 PM. I agree with what he has to say about the need to re-assure us […]
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