Yearly Archives: 2012

Top Experts Diss Housing Market Bullishness, Foresee Protracted Headwinds

The housing bulls seem unable to contain themselves. Today, in a prominently featured Bloomberg story, “Sales of New U.S. Homes Exceeded Estimates in March,” experts cheerily discuss a “firming” housing market and call for a bottom this year. Funny how these predictions for a real estate recovery seem to be a moving target.

Links 4/24/12

The Hidden Bank Time Bomb: Interest Rate Risk

At the Atlantic Economy Summit in Washington last month, Sheila Bair fielded a question about the just-released results of the latest bank stress tests. The former FDIC chief took pains to point out that they were an improvement over earlier iterations by virtue of keying off a truly dire economic scenario, but then ticked off a number of ways in which they fell short.

UK Fund Manager Challenges Deutsche Bank on Executive Pay

It’s taken a few years, but the revolt against extractive pay in banking is getting traction.

The Ministry of Truth Speaks: American Prospect Tries to Pass Off Mortgage Turncoat Schneiderman as Hero

I’m not looking forward to months of pre-election image-burnishing fabrication. The nausea-inducing offering of the day, The Man the Banks Fear Most from the American Prospect, gives us an idea of what we have in store.

The good news is that this revisionist history on the craven sellout by Eric Schneiderman on the mortgage settlement appears to be in response to a damaging New York Daily News article last week.

Europe’s Lunatics Rise

By Delusional Economics, who is horrified at the state of economic commentary in Australia and is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.

Back in December last year while discussing the ongoing woes of Europe, I suggested tha the fiscal compact may never actually be enacted because attempts to do so would have such a disastrous outcome that European nations will inevitably give up. I also mentioned in February that one of the things that could potentially effect any implementation was the European people themselves when they got to have a say about what was going on.

Over the weekend round one of the French presidential elections took place, and the results certainly aren’t pro-compact. In fact, I am not even sure they are pro-Europe:

Links 4/23/12

Michael Olenick: Rentals Gone Wild

Banks are manipulating the housing supply in an attempt to reignite a bubble to hide their losses, a strategy that’s temporarily working.

Philip Pilkington: Matt Yglesias’ Plan to Seize Your Savings for the Good of the Economy

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil

“Oh no! This is going to get silly!” That’s what I thought when I read the first few lines of Matthew Yglesias’ post on how, in a cashless economy central banks would be able to ‘cure’ recessions.

Earth Day: Mycelium Running

Lambert here. If your heart goes pit-a-pat when you hear the phrase “mycelial mat,” these presentations from mycological entrepreneur Paul Stamets, taken from the Agricultural Innovations podcasts of 2007, are for you.

The Big Picture (hat tip) put up two short, much more focused and, though I say it, investor-friendly TED talks from Stamets today, but I think the following long-form podcasts give a greater sense of the cornucopia of blazing insight that Stamets provides. Listen to these instead of NPR!