Does Driving Slower Save Gas? Truck and Barter
What the Troopergate Report Really Says Nathan Thornburgh, Time
Will the votes be counted accurately? Guardian
Iraqi government fuels ‘war for oil’ theories by putting reserves up for biggest ever sale Guardian
Struggling Americans may get more food stamps Times Online
China’s CIC May Have $5.4 Billion Frozen in Money-Market Fund Bloomberg (hat tip reader Scott)
Wall Street Heads For Darker Days Henry Kaufman, New York Times, February 23, 1990. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
IMF warns that markets could collapse by another 20% Times Online
After Weekend Financial Huddle, No Sign That Lenders Will Thaw Floyd Norris, New York Times. Norris goes to some length to be judicious, and on the spectrum of his usual commentary, this is strikingly downbeat.
LIBOR is in Backwardation and Significantly Divergent from Effective Fed Funds Jesse’s Cafe Americain
S&P 500 VS Nikkei 225 Spencer, Angry Bear
The Financial Crisis: Why Were Warnings Ignored? Richard Posner, Becker-Posner Blog (hat tip reader Dwight)
Antidote du jour (hat tip reader Megan):
10 comments
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Yves
What the heck are these cute critters? (never seen them and can’t place ’em!)
CrocodileChuck
Megan said they were foxes. With those huge ears, I would assume a desert fox. African?
By the black paws and large roundish ears, I’d say it’s a den of young bat-eared foxes, otocyon megalotis. Southern and eastern Africa.
You’ve gotta love this blog! Thanks, anon. 2:44 am!
CrocodileChuck
Five South African bat eared fox kits have emerged from their birthing den at the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park in San Diego,California in this Zoological Society of San Diego handout photo 08 June, 2007.
The Fed Acts in Middle of the night:
“Unlimited dollar liquidity …”
http://marketwarnings.blogspot.com/2008/10/unlimited-dollar-liquidity-fed-acts-on.html
Family group Edwardian style circa 1880.
Yves, thanks for the link to Richard Posner. What a joke! Here is one of the prime practitioners of ‘free market’ ideology asking with a seeming straight face why the current turmoil was not adequately seen in advance. Unbelievable. Posner, like Milton Friedman, has done more damage to American society than most so-called intellectuals. Posner’s bailiwick is the law where, for decades, he’s led a campaign to turn the law into an ideological economics exercise where, instead of rights, laws and principles, we’d have all legal matters, including by the way such things as due process, equal protection and voting, determined by Friedmanesque legislatures, courts and executive branch folks who assume the rational person with full information model of classic yet utterly unrealistic economics.
A few years back, Posner even proposed a ‘free market’ model for determining who was smartest — basically, ascribing real ‘intellectuals’ to whoever got the most votes in terms of whose books, articles, etc were most ‘cited’. By this approach, of course, someone like Roubini didn’t hold a candle of a chance to, say, someone like Karl Rove.
Posner is so pickled in his own destructive ideology that he now actually thinks he can sound reasonable in bemoaning the very arrogance and ignorance he himself has spent a life time creating.
Pathetic.
Like Anonymous of 8:59, I take Posner to be a witty but pernicious intellect. Since Posner here wishes to give credence to finance professors, let me paraphrase Peter Morici, who bookended Neel Kashkari’s statement this morning broadcast on C-SPAN: How we got here is no accident, it was caused by management and exces on Wall Street, because Boards had abrogated their responsibilities. What was missing was not stronger regulation; what was missing was ethics.
But “duty” is a concept more familiar to Kantians than free-marketeers…..
From the Norris/NYT link:
“Without a uniform international standard for such guarantees, Mr. Ackerman warned that cash would flow from unprotected banking systems to protected ones, what is known as ‘regulatory arbitrage.’
That could also happen within the United States if loans between commercial banks were guaranteed but loans to savings associations, brokerage firms and insurance companies were not.”
Well then …. Cary Leahey of Decision Economics was interviewed on NPR last week, and observed that if the US did (and might have to) employ a “Swedish” variety of fix, it would have to envelope foreign banks with sizable doings in the US.
Things sure are getting interesting…