This post first appeared on November 16, 2007 A colleague was so kind as to send me the text of a speech given at the Graham & Dodd breakfast a few weeks ago by David Einhorn, CEO of hedge fund Greenlight Capital. The speech has gotten play only in some personal-investment-oriented blogs like Seeking Alpha […]
Read more...Live Tiger found in check-in baggage Traffic Van-mounted body scanners coming to a street near you? Raw Story (hat tip reader John D). So this is where your tax dollars are going…. Beck rally will be a measure of ‘tea party’ strength Washington Post (hat tip reader Skippy): Beck, who is both admired and assailed […]
Read more...In case you’ve managed not to notice, the old saw, “the best government money can buy” increasingly applies to our legal system. In ECONNED, I describe briefly how a well funded “law and economics” movement which had corporate backing, including from the extreme right wing that was systematically trying to move America to the right, […]
Read more...The Jackson Hole conference starting today is expected to include a talk by Ben Bernanke on the benefits and costs of further monetary easing, which in ZIRP-land means quantitative easing. Gavyn Davies put up a good short list of arguments made against QE at the Financial Times, and most do not look terribly persuasive. One […]
Read more...Dolphins ‘cough’ up DNA secrets BBC India, the Rent-a-Womb Capital of the World Slate Irish debt downgrade raises fears of international deflation spiral Independent Ooh, they must be bored over at Clusterstock! Look at these stories (hat tip reader John D): 15% Of Women Have Slept With Their Bosses — And 37% Of Them Got […]
Read more...Normally, I don’t report on anecdotes from my immediate circle, but a set of conversations in less than a 24 hour period suggests that even those comparatively unaffected by the crisis are bracing themselves for the possibility of sudden, large-scale, adverse changes. And that sort of gnawing worry seems to be growing in New York […]
Read more...The very minute the Paul Volcker, who proposed the sound idea that government backstopped banks not engage in proprietary trading, said that trades done on behalf of customers were meant to be excluded from this proposal, anyone familiar with trading could see he’d just deep sixed his idea. Proprietary trading existed LONG before banks decided […]
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). Anatole Kaletsky (2010) Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis; Public Affairs, New York In their song Lola, Ray Davies and […]
Read more...Frankly, now that financial markets reform has moved from the Congressional shadowboxing stage to the arm-wrestling in smoke-filled room sort-out-the-details-that-matter stage, the retreat from public scrutiny has, of course, served as a cover for further watering down of measures that were not very strong to begin with. Yesterday we noted that major companies were outraged […]
Read more...→ Washington’s Blog (videos embedded at WashingtonsBlog.com) Bob Naman is an analytical chemist with almost 30 years in the field, based in Mobile, Alabama. When WKRG News 5 gave Naman samples of water from the Gulf of Mexico, Naman found oil contamination, and one of his samples actually exploded during testing due – he believes […]
Read more...Geoengineering ‘not a solution’ to sea-level rise BBC Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime New York Times. Confirms my Luddite biases against being constantly or merely frequently plugged in. How a government is formed Sydney Morning Herald (hat tip reader Crocodile Chuck). Another primer on politics Oz style. ‘Hitler war verwandt mit Somaliern, Berbern […]
Read more...I think we all know the answer to the question in the headline, courtesy F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The rich are different than you and me.” And the fact that they have more money means their defaults are couched as pure business decisions. But mere homeowners, told to view their house as an investment, are now […]
Read more...Boy, when you think you’ve seen the worst in utterly shameless, self serving tripe, someone manages to outdo it. Admittedly, it’s awfully hard to beat Steve Schwarzmann’s recent one-two punch of utter canard wrapped in tasteless hyperbole, that of Obama proposals that private equity kingpins pay taxes on what is really the fruits of their […]
Read more...It’s simply astonishing how often the myth of shareholder rule is parroted by the business press. Let’s see, average CEO pay was 49 times average worker pay in 1980. As of the most recent tabulation, 2008, it was 319 times average worker pay. And since that was the worst year of the crisis, and top […]
Read more...By Andrew Horowitz of The Disciplined Investor I always thought that record would stand until it was broken. Yogi Berra Let’s get right to the point…There is nothing good that can be said about the report that came out earlier. Existing home sales dropped off a cliff. – It is that simple. But, once the […]
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