There is a piece I regard as truly odd in the Wall Street Journal tonight. Either much of what I have read about investment bank bankruptcies is wrong, or something peculiar is at what used to be the house of Lehman. A Wall Street Journal article, “Lehman’s Chaotic Bankruptcy Filing Destroyed Billions in Value,” comments […]
Read more...Happy Holidays to all! Our Unconscious Brain Makes The Best Decisions Possible PhysOrg What Parrots Tell us About the Origin and Evolution of Birds ScienceBlogs The fallen giants of finance Financial Times. A very nice interactive feature. Market for Corporate Jets Goes Into Free-Fall New York Times South Asia descends into terror’s vortex Asia Times. […]
Read more...US economists have relentlessly harangued the Japanese for their supposed mismanagement of their post bubble era, which has lead to nearly 20 years of low growth, borderline deflation, with a not-much-discussed, robust export sector. Along with others, we complained in the early days of the Fed/Treasury emergency response that they were taking one of the […]
Read more...The end of days must be closer than I realized. Conservative stalwart Fox News is not only taking on the officialdom, it is going after Republican authorities. This is almost as much fun as learning that J. Edgar Hoover was a cross-dresser. But then again, Fox is going after the AIG rescue and the TARP, […]
Read more...Why is no one willing to call things by their proper names, and instead resort to euphemism and double-speak? A New York Times story today, “On Wall Street, Bonuses, Not Profits, Were Real,” makes its most important point in its headline, and managed to get some good data points on how rich investment bank compensation […]
Read more...From MarketWatch (weirdly, do not see referenced story on Wall Street Journal site, hat tip reader Scott): The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has decided to cut its oil output by 4.2 million barrels a day from September levels, or 2.2 million barrels a day from current output, the Wall Street Journal reported on its […]
Read more...In the past, I have been an FT loyalist and promoter, and found myself reflexively singing its praises earlier this week. But then I started to wonder if that was still true. Yes, I still turn to the FT regularly, but it appears to be losing its preeminent position. The pink paper has taken to […]
Read more...Nice piece, “Inside the Influential World of Econobloggers,” by Steve Miln which got prominent placement in the Boston Globe Sunday Ideas section. A good piece generally, with one minor frustration: one of our posts was mentioned by title in the third paragraph, without indicating the source (the first mention of NC didn’t occur until the […]
Read more...One robin does not make a spring, but I was struck by the subtext of this article at Bloomberg, “OPEC Failure Foretells Decline 10 Years After $10 Oil.” The mention of $10 oil is an odd bit of anchoring. And the general tone is surprisingly pessimistic. Key excerpts: A decade after OPEC failed to prevent […]
Read more...In the early days of this blog, I’d regularly compare the Wall Street Journal’s reporting of a news story with that of the Financial Times, because in the vast majority of cases, the Journal had either gotten it badly wrong or was putting a very positive spin on a less obviously cheery fact set. That […]
Read more...It’s the collateral damage… think of all those innocents who had nothing to do with GM’s recidivist mismanagement who will nevertheless be hurt This probably will not go down as a classic (say, the Apple 1984 commercial or the “Harry and Louise” campaign that helped torpedo the Clinton health care plan). And there is a […]
Read more...As readers may have noticed, we have gotten exercised about how brazenly the Treasury has been in lavishing cash on favored interests. Felix Salmon took up the theme, admittedly with less choler: There does indeed seem to have been a visible change in Treasury policy since the election. Until that point, it cared a little […]
Read more...As this Bloomberg article discusses in detail, the Fed has violated promises it made to Congress, both regarding the amount it would lend (the amounts are vastly in excess of anything envisaged) and its commitments about transparency (which have gone completely by the wayside). Bloomberg has petitioned to get certain details disclosed via a Freedom […]
Read more...I must confess that there are certain types of human activity that are a complete mystery to me, and much of the column ink spilled this weekend serves as a vivid reminder. There are two types of articles very much on display: 1. Who will key members of Obama’s cabinet be (with the financial press […]
Read more...A story by Andrew Ross Sorkin and Michael de la Merced, “Debt Linked to Huge Buyouts Is Tightening the Economic Vise,” covers the fact that private equity deals, which as a matter of course feature high leverage, are starting to hit the wall as the economy sours. This is hardly surprising; it’s happened in past […]
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