Economics

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  • Special Update on EUR/USD

    zentrader.ca
    jeff pierce
    22 May 2013 | 1:23 pm
    By ForexAlerts.ca The following is a recap of our call on the EUR/USD pair and how we recommended subscribers to trade. This morning the EUR/USD traded up past our range of 1.29942 (seen below) which is were we felt would be a solid short entry.  We closed that trade via twitter this morning at 9:30am for a PL: +141 pips profit Yesterday’s Commentary: EUR/USD is trading within a 1.27201 - 1.29942 range. We are on the sidelines. The outlook is bearish, but the pair needs to have some kind of a rally for us to get short. We want to establish a short position anywhere between…

  • P&G CEO Bob McDonald Steps Down After Pressure From Bill Ackman, Activist Investor (PG)

    Business Insider
    Jim Edwards
    23 May 2013 | 6:59 pm
    Bob McDonald, the 59-year-old CEO of Procter & Gamble and a 33-year veteran of the company, has stepped down suddenly. He will be replaced by an old hand: his predecessor, A.G. Lafley (presumably on a temporary basis — Lafley's 65 and has already been CEO once before). P&G is the world's largest advertiser, with a global media budget of more than $10 billion annually. The move comes after pressure from activist investor Bill Ackman, according to Forbes: McDonald was thought to be in jeopardy of losing his job last summer after a string of reductions to profit forecasts…

  • Perma-Stimulus, Again

    Paul Krugman
    By PAUL KRUGMAN
    21 May 2013 | 3:25 pm
    Been there, covered that.

  • Why didn’t the UK’s economic contraction and then stagnation lead to falling prices?

    Mindful Money » Shaun Richards
    Shaun Richards
    21 May 2013 | 2:46 am
    Today sees the publication of the UK inflation figures for April which are likely to show for the first time in a while a fall in the rate of annual inflation. However whilst this dip is welcome it will remain over target which will make it some 41 months in a row that this has been the case. To show the significance of this in relation to UK economic policy making I would like to take you back to the Bank of England Inflation Report of May 2009 which told us this. Inflation is likely to fall back sharply over the next few months…..inflation is more likely to be below the target than…

  • The Best Stock-Picker I Ever Knew

    Jeff Matthews Is Not Making This Up
    Jeff Matthews
    25 Mar 2013 | 2:11 pm
     The best stock-picker I ever knew died last week.   You never heard of him.  He did not yack about his picks in Barron’s annual Roundtable or chat up his latest buy with the talking heads on CNBC, and he certainly wasn’t posting anything on message boards—he actually didn’t use a computer. In fact, he still used a rotary phone in his house. The way he picked stocks was also from the dark ages: he combed the stock tables in the Wall Street Journal, looking for a very specific thing he liked to see in a stock. When he found that thing he…
 
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    naked capitalism

  • Links 5/24/13

    Yves Smith
    24 May 2013 | 12:43 am
    Apologies for having fewer posts than usual today. I’m really tired and have been having trouble concentrating. No particular trigger, just seems to be a weirdly low energy day. Cheese maker warned against supplying Gloucester cheese rolling BBC (Richard Smith) How the Ring Nebula became a doughnut: Stunning new Hubble images find interstellar cloud is ACTUALLY shaped like a ‘football-shaped jelly doughnut’ Daily Mail (John M) Solar plane sets distance record Bangkok Post (Lambert) Roll over Einstein: meet Weinstein Guardian Pope defends atheists: Atheists who do good are…

  • The Fed Has Painted Itself in a Corner

    Yves Smith
    24 May 2013 | 12:36 am
    Bernanke managed to shoot global markets in the head the day before yesterday, and then, as has become typical when investors throw brickbats at what the Fed has said, various mouthpieces go about talking the markets back up (this case, in the form of San Francisco Fed president John Williams pointing out that the central bank could ease off or reverse its QE exit if the economy faltered). I welcome readers telling me I’ve missed something, but looking at the Fed’s problem from 50,000 feet, it appears that the the monetary authority appears to have set boundary conditions for its…

  • Your Humble Blogger Appears on RT’s Truthseeker

    Yves Smith
    23 May 2013 | 11:27 pm
    Readers, hope you’ll enjoy this segment. But be warned, the presentation style is a bit manic. We discuss how outsourcing and offshoring are more about transferring income from low-level workers to middle and senior level managers than cost savings.

  • Wolf Richter: Government By Eurocrats – The Olive-Oil Dispenser Debacle

    Yves Smith
    23 May 2013 | 11:11 pm
    Yves here. This post illustrates a chief reason why regulation has become a bad word. It used to be that corporations would chafe under government rules for the obvious reason that they didn’t like being told what to do. The usual objection to regulation, that it reduces corporate profits, isn’t always true. For instance, McDonalds fought tooth and nail in the UK against giving up using styrofoam clamshells to keep takeout food warm. When it lost that battle, it found a more environmentally-friendly replacement that turned out to be no more costly. And regulations often spur…

  • Links 5/23/13

    Yves Smith
    23 May 2013 | 3:17 am
    Record Burmese python caught in Florida Guardian (Chuck L) Trends in Amphibian Occupancy in the United States Plos One via Washington Post (Lambert) Coral reefs ‘ruled by earthquakes and volcanoes‘ PhysOrg (Chuck L) Moore Tornado an EF-5; $2 Billion Damage Estimate: 3rd Costliest Tornado in History Wunderground (Lambert) The Hairy Building that Produces Clean Energy OilPrice New Documents Reveal How a 1980s Nuclear War Scare Became a Full-Blown Crisis Wired (Chuck L) “No to Profit”: Fighting Privatization in Chile Boston Review China factory output hits seven-month low…
 
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    Alpha.Sources

  • In Bernanke we Trust

    CV
    18 May 2013 | 4:36 pm
    Do you feel it too … The air of complacency that has engulfed financial markets and policy makers in the last month. With inflation falling and even the spectre of deflation now returning as a market meme as well as stubbornly weak growth, more stimulus and less concern about debt and deficits might of course seem warranted. Still, two points have caught my attention in recent weeks. The first is the decisive push against austerity with the IMF, EU commission and Germany all seemingly content to allow the periphery more time. The second is the combination of two extraordinary headlines…

  • The Dash for (negative) Yield at Wal-Mart

    CV
    7 Apr 2013 | 10:04 pm
    The idea of going for yield makes perfect sense; it is being encouraged by the wardens of our monetary system, it has continued to make a lot of money even as economic uncertainty has increased and despite trolls calling for a bubble in fixed income markets for years, prices have continued to soar. Calling a top in the global dash for yield has so far been futile. Indeed, with ZIRP now a structural characteristic of the global financial system, one has to countenance the fact that the race to the bottom in global yields have only just begun. Consider for example the latest uptake for…

  • When Safe Havens Fall

    CV
    24 Feb 2013 | 3:50 am
    By far the most important bit of economic news this week came in well after Europeans had closed down for the weekend in the form of Moody's decision to cut the UK's credit rating. It was important because it added some colour to why GPBUSD crashed through support earlier in the week (wink, wink) as well as it crystallised just how poor economic fundamentals have now become in the UK.  As always, Moody's are coming in after the fact. It has been pretty obvious for a while that to term the UK as a safe haven only made sense if you believed that continental Europe would sink into ground…

  • US Demographics - Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

    CV
    9 Dec 2012 | 10:23 pm
    First of all, I should apologize for readers for probably the longet hiatus ever on this blog. I am still trying to balance a busy day job with having time to pen blog posts. I am sure that I will manage to get a nice rythm going at some point.  As such, I thought that I would return to a topic that I actually do know a little about and this interesting piece in the WSJ by Carl Bialik on US fertility and the idea of a crisis driven birth collapse in the US. A recent report said the U.S. birth rate has dipped to a record low level. But another measure of the nation's fertility…

  • Busy!

    CV
    28 Sep 2012 | 2:39 am
    I have a lot to say about the utterly insane world we know live in where the worse the news, the stronger the rally, but too little time to say it in at the moment. Stay tuned!
 
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    The American Prospect

  • Ringside Seat: War Is Over?

    Paul Waldman
    23 May 2013 | 2:48 pm
    To be honest, before President Obama delivered his speech today on the "war on terror," we weren't too optimistic about what new ground it might break. But it turned out to be quite significant—perhaps not completely revolutionary, but meaningful nonetheless. Even as he made a lengthy argument in defense of the use of drones, Obama acknowledged not only that we have killed American citizens in drone strikes, but that the strikes have also killed civilians. He made, as he hasn't in some time, a strong case to shut down the prison in Guantanamo, and also announced a lifting of the…

  • The New New Haven

    Harold Meyerson
    23 May 2013 | 11:42 am
    Major Ruth became a civic leader because he made a promise to his neighbor, Brian Wingate. Both had moved to the Beaver Hills section of New Haven, Connecticut, in 2003. A neighborhood of aging single--family homes that had seen better days, Beaver Hills had been targeted by the city for a housing--rehabilitation program, and, with the zeal of new arrivals, Ruth, a manager at the local utility company, and Wingate, a custodian and union steward at nearby Yale University, sought to involve themselves in neighborhood--improvement ventures. That proved harder than they had anticipated. …

  • Conservative Billionaires, Oppressed by Liberal Thugs

    Paul Waldman
    23 May 2013 | 9:36 am
    Fear not, billionaire super PAC and 501(c)(4) funders. You may feel oppressed, you may fear the pitchforks and torches of the unwashed masses gathering at the gate of your manse, you may wake in the night in a cold sweat and bellow to your footman, "Dare I give Paul Ryan $10 million for his 2016 presidential race, lest some bearded plebian pen a vicious blog post aimed at my very heart?" If nothing else, Mitch McConnell has your back. Today, McConnell takes to the pages of The Washington Post to defend the right of America's millionaires and billionaires to pour their funds into campaigns…

  • When Queers Bash Back

    Gabriel Arana
    23 May 2013 | 7:42 am
    AP Photo/Jason DeCrow Members of the LGBT community and their supporters gather to protest a string of anti-gay attacks, including the fatal shooting of 32-year old Mark Carson on Saturday. On the oak-lined streets of the West Village in New York City—the home of Stonewall, the birthplace of the American gay-rights movement—or among the gym bunnies in Chelsea, gay people are allowed to feel safe. In case the same-sex couples with pastel cardigans walking their dogs aren’t enough, the chipped rainbow decals on the storefronts are there to remind you: You own this space. Going home to…

  • The Ted Cruz Immigration Shuffle

    Jamelle Bouie
    23 May 2013 | 7:32 am
    Gage Skidmore / Flickr National Journal’s Beth Reinhard has a great look at Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s transformation from pro-immigration policy advisor for George W. Bush, to right-wing, fire-breathing opponent of reform. When he was working for Bush, he crafted the campaign’s immigration policy, which included a sped-up application process, a greater number of work visas, and a provision that allowed relatives of permanent residents to visit the United States. Now, Cruz seems categorically opposed to anything that smacks of comprehensive reform. Reinhard notes that this transformation…
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    Brad DeLong

  • Michael Kinsley's Repeated Factual Errors: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

    J. Bradford DeLong
    23 May 2013 | 8:42 am
    Dan Drezner is sick of trying to reason with Michael Kinsley: Sometimes a factual error is just a factual error: I've spent a rather alarming portion of this week wading into intellectual pissing matches, so I'm loath to respond to Michael Kinsley's response to last week's brouhaha over austerity policies. But one paragraph does merit a response. After noting the backlash to his last column, Kinsley writes the following: There are two possible explanations. First, it might be that I am not just wrong (in saying that the national debt remains a serious problem and we’d be…

  • Kenneth Rogoff Is Smart Today

    J. Bradford DeLong
    23 May 2013 | 8:00 am
    Here: "Europe’s Lost Keynesians" by Kenneth Rogoff But I don't have time to react…

  • Michael Kinsley Says: Leave Ben Carson Alooooonnnneeee!!!!: Thursday "WTF?!" Weblogging

    J. Bradford DeLong
    23 May 2013 | 5:56 am
    Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Scott Lemieux: Did Michael Kinsley Invent the Concept of Same-Sex Marriage?: [T]his great moment in unwarranted self-aggrandizement: "The first known mention of gay marriage is an article (“Here Comes the Groom” by Andrew Sullivan) commissioned by me and published in this magazine in 1989." I… wow. I don’t mean to suggest that the Sullivan article wasn’t important in its way…. But “first known mention?” I don’t know what the very first was, but I do know that there were lawsuits claiming that bans on same-sex…

  • Liveblogging World War II: May 23, 1943

    J. Bradford DeLong
    23 May 2013 | 1:14 am
    Flying Fish - Dave Barry: In December 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor, a Pennsylvania dental surgeon named Lytle S. Adams thought of a way that the United States could fight back against Japan. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has undergone dental surgery that the idea he came up with was: attaching incendiary bombs to bats and dropping them out of airplanes. The idea was that the bats would fly into enemy buildings, and the bombs would go off and start fires, and Japan would surrender. So Dr. Adams sent his idea to the White House, which laughed so hard that it got a stomachache.

  • Noted for May 23, 2013

    J. Bradford DeLong
    23 May 2013 | 12:39 am
    Ben McLannahan: BoJ holds amid signs of economy ‘picking up’ | Paul Krugman: The point, I think, is that you can simultaneously fault the Fed and economists in general for failing to see this crisis coming, and ridicule the hedge fund guys for giving advice right now that is both ludicrous and dangerous. And you should | Martin Wolf: Global inaction shows that the climate sceptics have already won | Barry Ritholtz: GMAMX: Goldman Sach’s Muppet Fund of Funds | Robert Skidelsky: Austere Illusions | John Williams: Commencement Address: Economics Department: University of California,…
 
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    Calculated Risk

  • Friday: Durable Goods (and a comment on housing driving the recovery)

    Bill McBride
    23 May 2013 | 5:32 pm
    Several people have asked me about this article at CNBC by Jeff Cox: Why Housing Won't Drive the Recovery Despite data points that in some cases are at multiyear highs, Robert Shiller, Karl Case and David Blitzer believe there are multiple headwinds that will keep a lid on housing gains. Among the obstacles are a low level of new housing starts, an unexpectedly slow migration of so-called shadow inventory onto the market, and continued difficulty for buyers to secure financing. "You've got a lot of breathless commentary in the media," said Shiller, a Yale University economist. "All this talk…

  • Freddie Mac: "Mortgage Rates Continue Upward Trend"

    Bill McBride
    23 May 2013 | 12:33 pm
    From Freddie Mac today: Mortgage Rates Continue Upward Trend Freddie Mac (OTCQB: FMCC) today released the results of its Primary Mortgage Market Survey(R) (PMMS®), showing fixed mortgage rates trending higher for the third consecutive week and putting pressure on refinance momentum. ... 30-year fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) averaged 3.59 percent with an average 0.7 point for the week ending May 23, 2013, up from last week when it averaged 3.51 percent. Last year at this time, the 30-year FRM averaged 3.78 percent. 15-year FRM this week averaged 2.77 percent with an average 0.7 point, up from…

  • A few comments on New Home Sales

    Bill McBride
    23 May 2013 | 9:47 am
    Obviously the new home sales report this morning was solid with sales above expectations and significant upward revisions to prior months. I try not to react too much to the month to month ups and downs; the key points right now are that sales are increasing and will probably continue to increase for some time. Now that we have four months of data for 2013, one way to look at the growth rate is to use the "not seasonally adjusted" (NSA) year-to-date data. According to the Census Bureau, there were 153 thousand new homes sold in 2013 through April, up about 26.4% from…

  • Kansas City Fed: Regional Manufacturing expanded in May

    Bill McBride
    23 May 2013 | 8:47 am
    From the Kansas City Fed: Tenth District Manufacturing Survey Improved Somewhat The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City released the May Manufacturing Survey today. According to Chad Wilkerson, vice president and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the survey revealed that Tenth District manufacturing activity improved somewhat, rising above zero for the first time in seven months, and producers’ expectations for future activity also increased. “It was good to finally see a positive number after seven months of modest declines, and for optimism about future activity to…

  • New Home Sales at 454,000 SAAR in April

    Bill McBride
    23 May 2013 | 7:00 am
    The Census Bureau reports New Home Sales in April were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of 454 thousand. This was up from 444 thousand SAAR in March (March sales were revised up from 417 thousand). January sales were revised up from 445 thousand to 458 thousand, and February sales were revised up from 411 thousand to 429 thousand. Very strong upward revisions. The first graph shows New Home Sales vs. recessions since 1963. The dashed line is the current sales rate. "Sales of new single-family houses in April 2013 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 454,000,…
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    Crooked Timber

  • Call for Participation: Doctoral Workshop

    Eszter Hargittai
    21 May 2013 | 6:27 am
    I’m very excited to be hosting a doctoral workshop this summer on “Developing Best Practices for Using Digital Tools to Study Human Behavior in Online Environments“. I’m hoping to attract a multidisciplinary group. Please forward, post, tweet, retweet the call for participation below. And if you’re interested, but at a different stage of work, please see a form for that below as well. Here’s an example tweet for your convenience or feel free to write your own: CFP Doctoral workshop @webuse on Digital tools to study human behavior in online environments…

  • A Monster In Paris

    John Holbo
    19 May 2013 | 10:15 pm
    Man does not live by long Hayek posts alone! Take this TLS piece on Frankenstein (via Andrew Sullivan). I love this stuff. I haven’t read the books being reviewed, but differences between the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein are a hobbyhorse of mine. It started with my interest in the history of sf, and the interesting way in which Shelley invented the genre, then un-invented it by rewriting the book to be less sf. Funny sort of backtrack. But that’s far from being the weirdest thing about the book. The weirdest thing in Frankenstein? In chapter 3 of volume II the monster…

  • O upright judge! Is Hayek Like Nietzsche or not?

    John Holbo
    19 May 2013 | 8:41 pm
    I’m a bit late, responding to Corey’s ‘Nietzsche’s Marginal Children’ essay (and post). But here goes. In this post I will say what I think is right about Corey’s basic thesis. We can then – if you like – argue the degree to which I’m agreeing with what Corey actually said, or maybe substituting something that’s more my own, but clearly in the same vicinity, conclusion-wise. (We’ll be pretty tired by then, however. Long post.) I know Nietzsche well, Hayek well enough – The Constitution of Liberty, in particular –…

  • Good (and bad) news from the Open Access front

    Ingrid Robeyns
    17 May 2013 | 6:46 am
    I recently wrote a short ‘comment’ for the American Journal of Bioethics. The piece is 1788 words long, the names and affiliations of my co-author and myself included. So that will make for 3, perhaps 4 printed pages, right? Now, Taylor and Francis, the publisher of the AJoBE offered the possibility to make this piece Open Access. Price: $2,950. I say: ridiculous. One of my colleagues said: Obscene. Sure, you might say, but they need to pay the editorial office who guards the refereeing proces of the target article to which we respond. But who did the refereeing? Indeed: two (or…

  • Marianne Ferber died

    Ingrid Robeyns
    17 May 2013 | 5:21 am
    Marianne Ferber died a few days ago, at age 90. Ferber was one of the founding feminist economists. There is a nice Obit by Frances Woolley here. I remember Marianne from the IAFFE conferences that I visited as a grad student. One of the most striking memories I have about her is how she would, despite her seniority and fame/status in the field, talk to anyone – indeed, perhaps she even looked out for those who were young or new to the feminist economic community – a virtue one does not always see among the most senior/famous people in a field, and which was definitely not my…
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    Dealbreaker

  • Paul Tudor Jones Has Theory On Women Traders, Strangely Graphic Description Of Breastfeeding To Share

    Bess Levin
    23 May 2013 | 1:11 pm
    “You will never see as many great women investors or traders as men. Period. End of story. And the reason why is not because they’re not capable. They’re very capable. Like, one of my No. 1 rules as an investor is as soon as my manager, if I find out that manager is going through… Continue reading »Follow Dealbreaker on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.Tags: bosoms, lady traders, Paul Tudor Jones, so that's something, Tudor Investment Corp    

  • Anshu Jain’s Rosetta Stone Tapes Are PAYING OFF

    Bess Levin
    23 May 2013 | 11:13 am
    “Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, liebe Aktionäre” [Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders]. “Herzlich willkommen zur Hauptversammlung der Deutschen Bank” [A warm welcome to Deutsche Bank's annual general meeting]. Deutsche Bank’s co-chief executive, Anshu Jain, Thursday awed shareholders by giving a two-page introductory speech at the bank’s annual shareholders meeting in…German. It was the moment some… Continue reading »Follow Dealbreaker on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.Tags: Anshu Jain, Deutsche Bank, Germans    

  • Seamless Watch ’13: Macquarie

    Bess Levin
    23 May 2013 | 10:21 am
    On the heels of this, the Aussies have taken an ax to (weekend) food allowances and its (junior) mistmakers, for one, are having none of it! Continue reading »Follow Dealbreaker on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.Tags: angry junior mistmakers, Macquarie, morale re food, this is serious    

  • Corporate Governance Watchdog Could Be Bought Off Surprisingly Cheaply

    Matt Levine
    23 May 2013 | 10:18 am
    “SEC Charges Institutional Shareholder Services …” is the sort of start to a headline that might make you think, ha ha ha SEC, always going after the bit players who keep big companies honest rather than the dishonest companies themselves. How’s Egan-Jones doing? But that wouldn’t be fair, for one thing because ISS – which… Continue reading »Follow Dealbreaker on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.Tags: Institutional Shareholder Services, ISS, proxy fights, SEC    

  • SoFi Answers the Call to Refinance Student Loans and Provides Unique Community Benefits

    Breaking Media
    23 May 2013 | 9:00 am
    This is a guest post written by SoFi’s CEO, Mike Cagney. CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE Recently, there’s been a lot of talk amongst leaders in Washington about how to improve the painful process of repaying student loans. At SoFi, we feel your pain and work hard to offer more flexible, more affordable… Continue reading »Follow Dealbreaker on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.Tags: debt, Refinance, SoFi, Student Loans, Students, this is an ad    
 
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    Econbrowser

  • Wisconsin Employment Situation in April

    Menzie Chinn
    23 May 2013 | 3:00 pm
    Newly released BLS data indicate an absence of strong employment growth. Figure 1: Wisconsin private nonfarm payroll employment, seasonally adjusted (blue), Walker’s implied path for private employment (red). NBER defined recession dates shaded gray. Source: BLS and NBER. To place this outcome in context, I compare the change in Wisconsin private employment against the US. Figure 2: Log Wisconsin private nonfarm payroll employment, seasonally adjusted (blue), and US (red), both normalized to 2011M01=0. Source: BLS, NBER and author’s calculations. There has been some debate over the…

  • Bernanke says no change for now

    James Hamilton
    22 May 2013 | 11:51 am
    In testimony before Congress today, Bernanke explained why the Fed's large-scale asset purchases are continuing. Inflation as measured by the CPI or PCE deflator has been about 1% over the last year, while the most recent report put the unemployment rate at 7.5%. Bernanke observed: With unemployment well above normal levels and inflation subdued, fostering our congressionally mandated objectives of maximum employment and price stability requires a highly accommodative monetary policy. Normally, the Committee would provide policy accommodation by reducing its target for the federal funds rate,…

  • Are There Reasonable Approaches to Fiscal Consolidation?

    Menzie Chinn
    20 May 2013 | 11:30 pm
    According to the CBO, under the President’s budget, the deficit hovers around 2% of GDP, and debt-to-GDP stabilizes through 2023 at levels lower than today’s. Hence, were the President’s budget to be implemented, the budget would be on a path to medium run stabilization. This point is illustrated in Figures 1 and 2 from the CBO report. Source: An Analysis of the President’s 2014 Budget. Source: An Analysis of the President’s 2014 Budget. Now, it’s clear that with the Congress we have, it is highly unlikely that the President’s budget would be implemented. On the other hand,…

  • Koch's Coke

    Menzie Chinn
    20 May 2013 | 4:45 pm
    ...in Detroit Here is striking photo of a pile of by-product of processing Canadian tar sands oil, from NY Times: Figure 1: Petroleum coke, a waste byproduct of refining oil sands oil, is piling up along the Detroit River. As the article notes: Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom. And no one knows quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it. The company is controlled by Charles and David Koch... Detroit’s pile will not be the only one. Canada’s efforts to sell more products derived…

  • Sovereign debt concerns in 2013

    James Hamilton
    19 May 2013 | 7:23 am
    Interest rates on government debt for a number of European countries-- notably Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, and Spain-- shot up considerably during 2010-2012. Those yields have fallen significantly from their peaks, though these five countries still face higher borrowing costs than most other countries in Europe. Yields on long-term government bonds, Jan 2009 to April 2013. Data source: Eurostat. Europe has now been in an economic recession for a year and a half, with Eurostat reporting that the 17 EU countries had an average drop of real GDP of 0.6% in 2012. But real GDP in the 5…
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    EconLog: Library of Economics and Liberty

  • Coase on a Plane: My Answer

    Art Carden
    24 May 2013 | 1:44 am
    (May 24, 2013 01:44 AM, by Art Carden) Thanks to everyone who offered excellent comments on my last post. Most people were thinking about it the way I do. To recap, here were the questions I someday want to ask on an exam or in a job interview:... (1 COMMENTS)

  • Consumer Surplus: An Application of the Concept

    David Henderson
    23 May 2013 | 12:50 pm
    (May 23, 2013 12:50 PM, by David Henderson) I've written on consumer surplus a number of times on this blog. See here. David Boaz recently posted on a 1979 talk by Nathaniel Branden to which I was the introducer. In my intro to Nathan, I applied the concept... (2 COMMENTS)

  • Coase on a Plane, or, an Idea, Recycled

    Art Carden
    23 May 2013 | 11:40 am
    (May 23, 2013 11:40 AM, by Art Carden) I agree with co-blogger Bryan that most voters are rationally irrational. My sense is that there are also a lot of voters and people in positions of influence who know just enough economics to be dangerous. As Steve Horwitz and... (16 COMMENTS)

  • The Flaw in Heyne, Boettke, and Prychitko

    David Henderson
    23 May 2013 | 3:27 am
    (May 23, 2013 03:27 AM, by David Henderson) In a post on Tuesday, "Find the Flaw," I asked readers to find and evaluate the implicit assumption in the following passage from an economics textbook: When physicians must be licensed and new drugs approved by the Food and Drug... (10 COMMENTS)

  • Commuting, Chronic Stress, and Costs That Are Harder to See

    Art Carden
    22 May 2013 | 4:27 pm
    (May 22, 2013 04:27 PM, by Art Carden) This morning, I tweeted the following: Spend extra $ to cut your commute. I read (in @rdobelli's book?) that we underestimate commuting costs.— Art Carden (@artcarden) May 22, 2013 We've tried to model it. When we lived in Memphis, we... (12 COMMENTS)
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    NYT > Money & Policy

  • California Puts Tentative Price on Health Policies Under New Law

    By REED ABELSON
    23 May 2013 | 6:49 pm
    Thirteen insurers had been chosen to sell policies through the insurance marketplace — or exchange — being created under the law.    

  • Doctor and Patient: Doctors Ill Prepared for Patients With Disabilities

    By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.
    23 May 2013 | 12:56 pm
    Nearly 23 years after the Americans With Disabilities Act went into effect, patients with disabilities continue to receive inadequate medical care — and many cannot even get a doctor’s appointment.    

  • Well: What’s in Your Green Tea?

    By ANAHAD O'CONNOR
    23 May 2013 | 12:49 pm
    A new report from ConsumerLab.com shows that some bottled varieties of green tea appear to be little more than sugar water, while some green tea leaves are contaminated with lead.    

  • Well: Mothers With Cancer

    By SUSAN GUBAR
    23 May 2013 | 12:24 pm
    Children of mothers with cancer must learn this painful lesson early: the vulnerability of the figure on whom they have grounded their existence. With varying degrees of fearful awareness, such children intuit that the mother who comforts by murmuring “I am here” will not always be there.    

  • Well: Aging: Fewer Elderly Deaths in Flu Pandemics

    By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
    23 May 2013 | 7:07 am
    Age has its privileges, and a new study suggests that one of them may be immunity to some flu pandemics.    
 
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    Economist's View

  • Paul Krugman: Japan the Model

    Mark Thoma
    24 May 2013 | 12:33 am
    If Abenomics works, it could help to overcome the "economic defeatism" that has overtaken policymakers in the US and other countries: Japan the Model, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: A generation ago, Japan was widely admired — and feared — as an economic paragon. ... Then Japan fell into a seemingly endless slump, and most of the world lost interest. The main exceptions were a relative handful of economists... If one big, wealthy, politically stable country could stumble so badly, they wondered, couldn’t much the same thing happen to other such countries? Sure enough,…

  • Fed Watch: More Fed - It Never Ends

    Mark Thoma
    24 May 2013 | 12:24 am
    Tim Duy: More Fed - It Never Ends, by Tim Duy: Bloomberg is carrying an interview with San Francisco President John Williams. Williams reiterates the possibility that future policy moves may be up or down: “Even if we do adjust downward our purchases, it doesn’t mean we’re now in some autopilot of moving in the same direction,” Williams, 50, said in an interview yesterday in San Francisco. “You could even imagine a scenario where we adjust it downward based on good data and then adjust it back” if the economy weakened. Yes, the Fed can change policy in any direction. But I…

  • Links for 05-24-2013

    Mark Thoma
    24 May 2013 | 12:03 am
    The case for 4% inflation - Laurence Ball It’s Not About You - Paul Krugman Michael Kinsley's Repeated Factual Errors - Brad DeLong The Liquidity Trap and Macro Textbooks - mainly macro America's Frogs and Toads Disappearing Fast - Scientific American Conservative economists push immigration reform - Seung Min Kim The strangely familiar browsing habits of 14th-century readers - MIT News The Economic Nature of the Resource Curse: Mechanisms - Why Nations Fail I-5 bridge collapses, throwspeople into river (Infrastructure) - Register-Guard Is There Really a "Conservative…

  • Fed Watch: Bernanke Saves the Day

    Mark Thoma
    23 May 2013 | 12:05 pm
    Tim Duy: Bernanke Saves the Day, by Tim Duy: There was some initial consternation yesterday after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave the clarity we were hoping to see. From Reuters: "If we see continued improvement and we have confidence that that's going to be sustained then we could in the next few meetings ... take a step down in our pace of purchases," he said. "Next few meetings" sounds like September at the eariliest. Indeed, September or December are the most likely meetings given both have an associated press conference. For financial market…

  • 'Not Too Late for the Social Credit Helicopters!'

    Mark Thoma
    23 May 2013 | 11:31 am
    This is the kind of thing I had in mind when I called for bold, creative proposals from the Fed to address the unemployment problem. Via Brad DeLong: Duncan Black: Eschaton: Not Too Late For The Helicopters: A big tragedy of the last few years is the failure to recognize that being in a low inflation world at the zero lower bound was a tremendous opportunity to massively enhance human welfare in this country. Mailing out 10 grand checks to everyone would have been an egalitarian massive boost to the economic well-being of huge numbers of people. Instead, the Fed has goosed asset prices,…
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    EconTalk

  • Epstein on the Constitution

    Russell Roberts
    20 May 2013 | 3:30 am
    Richard Epstein of New York University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the U.S. Constitution. Topics covered in this wide-ranging conversation include how the interpretation of the Constitution has changed over time, the relationship between state and federal power, judicial activism, the increasing importance of administrative agencies' regulatory power, and political influences on the Supreme Court. Play Time: 1:02:30 How do I listen to a podcast? Download Size: 28.7 MB Right-click or Option-click, and select "Save Link/Target As MP3.

  • Frakt on Medicaid and the Oregon Medicaid Study

    Russell Roberts
    13 May 2013 | 3:30 am
    Austin Frakt of Boston University and blogger at The Incidental Economist talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about Medicaid and the recent results released from the Oregon Medicaid study, a randomized experiment that looked at individuals with and without access to Medicaid. Recent released results from that study found no significant impact of Medicaid access on basic health measures such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels, but did find reduced financial stress and better mental health. Frakt gives his interpretation of those results and the implications for the Affordable Care Act.

  • Bernstein on Communication, Power and the Masters of the Word

    Russell Roberts
    6 May 2013 | 3:30 am
    William Bernstein talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his latest book, Masters of the Word. Bernstein traces the history of language, writing, and communication and its impact on freedom. The discussion begins with the evolution of language and the written word and continues up through radio and the internet. A particular focus of the conversation is how tyrants use information technology to oppress their people but at the same time, technology can be used to liberate people from oppression. Play Time: 1:01:33 How do I listen to a podcast? Download Size: 28.2 MB Right-click or…

  • Galbraith on Inequality

    Russell Roberts
    29 Apr 2013 | 3:30 am
    James Galbraith of the University of Texas and author of Inequality and Instability talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about inequality. Galbraith argues that much of the mainstream analysis of inequality in the economics literature is flawed. Galbraith looks at a variety of different measures and ways of analyzing income data. In the podcast he focuses on how much of measured inequality is due to changes in specific counties or industries. Other topics discussed include the state of economics in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the importance of the government safety net and other…

  • Glaeser on Cities

    Russell Roberts
    22 Apr 2013 | 3:30 am
    Edward Glaeser of Harvard University and author of The Triumph of Cities talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about American cities. The conversation begins with a discussion of the history of Detroit over the last century and its current plight. What might be done to improve Detroit's situation? Why are other cities experiencing similar challenges to those facing Detroit? Why are some cities thriving and growing? What policies might help ailing cities and what policies have helped those cities that succeed? The conversation concludes with a discussion of why cities have such potential for…
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    Environmental Economics

  • The new phonebooks are here!

    John Whitehead
    23 May 2013 | 11:15 am
    In other words, Tim and I have an essay in the latest AERE Newsletter. From the inbox: Here is a link to the May issue of the AERE Newsletter. I hope you take some time to look it over. Read about plans for the upcoming AERE Summer Conference in Banff, Alberta, Canada this June with nearly 300 members attending—a great turnout! And check out the opportunities for presenting your work at regional meetings—including the addition of the Midwest Economic Association. Plus this issue has two interesting essays—one entitled What Do Environmental and Resource Economists Think? Preliminary…

  • CBO: Carbon tax an option to avoid 'catastrophic' outcomes

    John Whitehead
    23 May 2013 | 7:24 am
    The Hill's E2-Wire: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) noted Wednesday that a carbon tax could generate “significant” revenues for the United States and avert “catastrophic” effects of climate change. CBO said in a new report that there are many uncertainties about how to design and implement a carbon tax, but waiting too long to curb greenhouse gas emissions would have clear results. ... A carbon tax, while politically divisive, has continued to surface as an option for raising revenues as Congress dives into discussions about overhauling the federal tax code. Last month, a…

  • Sports Dad Update

    Tim Haab
    23 May 2013 | 6:39 am
    I used to post a lot of updates about my kids and sports, mainly to convince you that I am not just a charming dork, but I also have a life outside of my office.  I stopped posting so many updates because, well, I get the feeling you really don't care--who wants to hear anyone talk about their kids?  Anyway for the handful who used to enjoy those posts...here's a news one: Under second-year coach Jim Muessig, the Celtics finished 14-13 overall, breaking the program record for victories in a season that was set last spring when the team went 12-12. Prior to last year, the…

  • Common Resources: Climate Policy in California

    John Whitehead
    23 May 2013 | 5:48 am
    Dallas Burtraw:I recently testified before a California Senate Select Committee on the state’s climate policies about California’s interactions in the development of policy across the country and internationally. I highlighted the four main points below in my remarks, and you can read the full testimony here. California is not alone. It is joined by many other jurisdictions in reducing climate pollution. But California is the leader in designing climate policy. California’s leadership is accelerating the erosion of climate gridlock at the international level. The value of leadership…

  • This is why you should never read your own blog

    John Whitehead
    23 May 2013 | 5:10 am
    Matt Kahn: Over the last couple of weeks, I have been re-reading the roughly 2600 blog posts I have written since 2005.  I owe everyone an apology.  Only 15% of them are good.  Too many of the posts are self serving, and/or silly.    The reason I sat down to read through all of them is that I knew that I did post some good material related to environmental and urban economics and I've now extracted that material and I'm rewriting it into a new free e-book I will release on environmental and urban economics. From now on, I will be posting less silly stuff. via…
 
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    footnoted*

  • More fun with filings from Expeditors Int’l

    Michelle Leder
    23 May 2013 | 11:17 am
    It’s safe to say that reading filings isn’t the type of thing that typically sparks witty cocktail party conversations, such as the type footnoted readers are likely to have this upcoming Memorial Day weekend. But the 8-K that Expeditors International filed yesterday afternoon is clearly an exception to the rule. We’ve footnoted before about Expeditors, which has practically made an art form out of filing with the SEC. And yesterday’s filing didn’t disappoint. While the filing was a routine Q&A response to questions that Expeditors says it has received from…

  • Off by $2 million at Northrup Grumman

    Michelle Leder
    15 May 2013 | 7:40 am
    Northrup Grumman has been something of a frequent flyer here at footnoted. All the way back in 2005, we wrote about its thrice (now quadruple-retired) CFO Charles Noski. There’s also been overly generous consulting deals for other top executives, elite health benefits for former executives, and other lavish retirements. So when we came across this 8-K that the company filed on Monday, we couldn’t help but take a closer look. In the filing, the company notes that it made mistakes on several calculations for post-retirement benefits for several executives. The errors aren’t a…

  • Big Lots’ big Friday night dump

    Michelle Leder
    8 May 2013 | 12:39 pm
    We’re never REALLY surprised at the things that wind up in what we’ve come to call the Friday Night Dump — that 90 minute period after the markets close on a Friday, but the SEC remains open for filings. Our own research shows that nearly 9% of all 8Ks filed in a given week are filed after 4 pm on a Friday, which depending on your view of the world is either due to companies rushing to get things in before the weekend or hoping to bury them in plain sight. Most of what we find in the Friday Night Dump, we publish for Pro subscribers. In fact, we have a separate category just…

  • New details in Google’s proxy on Stanford, 23andme

    Michelle Leder
    25 Apr 2013 | 7:59 am
    We’re at the tail end of proxy season and proxies are coming in fast and furious (the deadline for many companies is next Tuesday, April 30). While proxies are known for having lots of interesting information related to compensation, we found something else interesting in the proxy that Google filed yesterday. First, a bit of background: Google’s ties to Stanford University are well-documented. Co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page first developed PageRank while students at Stanford and the university holds the patent, which was issued in Sept. 2001. Stanford President John…

  • Microsoft’s game of bait and switch and switch

    Michelle Leder
    19 Apr 2013 | 5:44 am
    Chances are you’ve already heard about Microsoft’s big earnings report yesterday. The headline on the press release that came out following Thursday’s market close proudly hailed that “Microsoft delivers record third-quarter revenue and earnings per share”. That same release — and to be fair, the headline following the record earnings — noted that CFO Peter Klein would be stepped down by the end of the fiscal year. That was the first bait and switch: upbeat earnings combined with the announcement of the CFO stepping down. And that’s how all of…
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    Free exchange

  • Link exchange

    R.A. | WASHINGTON
    23 May 2013 | 1:01 pm
    TODAY'S recommended economics writing:• Europe's lost Keynesians (Project Syndicate)• The banking crisis as a giant carry trade gone wrong (Vox)• Don't fear the bubble (Felix Salmon)• Foreign borrowing in the euro area periphery (Liberty Street)

  • Things could be better

    R.A. | WASHINGTON
    23 May 2013 | 8:37 am
    THE Pew Research Centre has released new figures assessing attitudes around the world on economic issues. The results are fascinating, sobering, and not that surprising. Things seem to have gone a bit worse since 2007 than most people had anticipated at the time.As you can see at right, the euro-area periphery has had the worst of it. Just 1% (1%!) of Greeks felt that the country's economy was in good shape. The Japanese saw things as being roughly as rubbish as they had been for the decade before the crisis. The Germans and South Koreans (along with many residents of emerging markets) were…

  • Out of harm's way

    R.A. | WASHINGTON
    22 May 2013 | 2:21 pm
    IT HAS been almost a month since the collapse of a factory building in Bangladesh killed over 1,100 garment workers. The tragedy led to outrage in Bangladesh over the recklessness of the building's politically connected owner; factory operations were allegedly in the building without permits and workers were ordered to their machines even after inspectors found dangerous cracks in the structure. But the catastrophe has also led to a new round of reflection in advanced economies over the ethics of purchasing consumer products built by poor labourers in countries with lax labour…

  • Right into the dollar zone

    R.A. | WASHINGTON
    21 May 2013 | 9:36 am
    MY SUNDAY post on the importance of inflation in Germany seems to have been misunderstood by, among others, Tyler Cowen. Let's address some points.First, many people chided me for not knowing that Ecuador and El Salvador had dollarised. In fact, I was well aware of their dollarisation. Careful readers may have noted that I did not argue that the Latin American analogy "could not be more different" because it doesn't involve a shared currency, but because:America has not made a deep political and economic union with Ecuador or El Salvador the central focus of its economic and diplomatic…

  • Link exchange

    R.A. | WASHINGTON
    20 May 2013 | 3:39 pm
    TODAY'S recommended economics writing:• Do big cities help college graduates find better jobs? (Liberty Street)• Do peer effects have inegalitarian implications? (Marginal Revolution)• Boom or bubble? (New Yorker)• The liquidationist urge (Paul Krugman)• The biggest mistake 60-year old men make about the economy (Atlantic)• The decline of innovation-blocking institutions (Vox)• Narayana Kocherlakota on safe assets (David Beckworth)
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    Greg Mankiw's Blog

  • Weitzman on Climate Change

    Greg Mankiw
    23 May 2013 | 1:19 pm
    Wisdom from my Harvard colleague Marty Weitzman.

  • On Stock Investing

    Greg Mankiw
    18 May 2013 | 2:10 pm
    Click here to read my column in Sunday's NY Times.

  • Christy Romer on Japan

    Greg Mankiw
    14 May 2013 | 2:50 am
    Last month, I had the pleasure of hearing Christy Romer give a great talk about Japanese monetary policy at the NBER Macro Annual conference.  You can now read it here.

  • The ZLB in My Favorite Textbook

    Greg Mankiw
    13 May 2013 | 8:37 am
    In a recent blog post, Paul Krugman writes:As far as I know, among basic textbooks only Krugman/Wells even talks about the liquidity trap.This is probably a true statement.  It is not that other books don't cover the topic, however.  It is just that Paul Krugman doesn't know it.FYI, here is what the leading introductory text says about the topic:The Zero Lower Bound As we have just seen, monetary policy works through interest rates. This conclusion raises a question: What if the Fed’s target interest rate has fallen as far as it can? In the recession of 2008 and 2009, the…

  • Stocks are cheap

    Greg Mankiw
    9 May 2013 | 5:21 am
    ...say two NY Fed economists.  
 
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    Hedge fund

  • Hedge Fund Legend?

    Veryan Allen
    18 May 2013 | 3:08 am
    The biggest bull market is the growth in demand for better investment solutions. Solving problems for institutional and individual clients has always been my focus. I hope you found Hedge Fund informative. Please email if you would like to meet up as I travel often. Skill is the only truly investment grade asset. 100% in skill is the correct allocation for any investor. Never again permit large market factor exposures to inflict major damage on personal savings, retirement planning, foundation spending, endowment budgets or pension liabilities. The 5 most read Hedge Fund Blog posts since…

  • World's top hedge fund?

    Veryan Allen
    12 May 2013 | 4:08 pm
    Warren Buffett runs a hedge fund called Berkshire Hathaway and George Soros is the top performing living hedge fund manager. They searched for successors only from other hedge funds and, like all prudent investors, keep their ENTIRE net worth in diversified absolute return strategies. Hedge fund managers NEVER retire. The vocation is for life. To destroy the efficient markets hypothesis ONE counterexample is sufficient. I've invested client capital in hundreds of counterexamples. Warren is mainly a derivatives and hybrids trader though he buys a few stocks as a hobby. "We have long invested…

  • Machines v humans

    Veryan Allen
    12 May 2013 | 9:05 am
    Beware of hedge fund geeks bearing greeks? Some models don't work so all models don't work? Black box alpha is complicated so stay with "simple" beta? Humans do all the programming at quant funds so it is their sagacity or stupidity driving results. It depends on the questions people ask their computers. If you input the wrong questions with wrong assumptions then the "answers" will be incorrect. Blame the mechanic or the oily rag? I've heard many times that quant investing will replace humans but conversely I am hearing, yet again, that "this is the end of quant"! Both are wrong. There is…

  • Asset allocation fails

    Veryan Allen
    8 May 2013 | 4:08 pm
    Asset allocation is NOT the primary driver of returns. It's skilled portfolio construction from manager, product and security selection. Was nothing learnt from 2008? Asset allocation dominated conventional "wisdom" and wrecked peoples' portfolios. Trillions are mis-invested due to nonsense. Time slows for no-one so don't grow old riding out drawdowns and gambling on the dangerously absurd ideas of Fama, Markowitz and Sharpe. 100% in ALPHA is the way to go. Eventually the market will recover but that time will never be recovered. Never go for cheap "advice". If investors always invested 100%…

  • Quant hedge fund

    Veryan Allen
    30 Apr 2013 | 8:34 pm
    Quant hedge fund? The steamroller of the credit crisis flattened nickel collectors in the equity markets that hadn't realized they were in its path. Damaged collateral caused collateral damage. Some quant funds saw their "hedges" become Texas hedges as shorts rose and longs fell. So-called "market neutral" strategies were short only dispersion and got caught in a PREDICTABLE short squeeze. Market neutral is NOT risk neutral and there is no mean to revert to. Monitor for crowded trades and take the other side. Dumb VaR "logic": it hasn't happened so NEVER will happen! The trouble with standard…
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    interfluidity

  • The mother of invention

    Steve Randy Waldman
    30 Apr 2013 | 12:32 am
    I thought I’d quickly highlight a point made recently by two great posts. First, here’s J.W. Mason: There is increasing recognition in the mainstream of the importance of hysteresis — the negative effects on economic potential of prolonged unemployment. There’s little or no discussion of anti-hysteresis — the possibility that inflationary booms have long-term positive effects on aggregate supply. But I think it would be easy to defend the argument that a disproportionate share of innovation, new investment and laborforce broadening happens in periods when demand…

  • The generalized resource curse

    Steve Randy Waldman
    22 Apr 2013 | 4:25 am
    A useful way to understand the pickle we’re in, I think, is that we are suffering from the so-called “resource curse”. If you are unfamiliar with the phrase, “resource curse” refers to the regularity with which countries “blessed” with abundant natural resources end up as dystopian polities with dysfunctional economies. Nigeria has a lot of oil but no one wants to live there. The resource curse is pretty easy to understand. It’s not associated with just any sort of natural resource. Switzerland has beautiful mountains and stuff that people would…

  • A bit more on savings and investment

    Steve Randy Waldman
    10 Apr 2013 | 7:00 am
    Steve Roth (1, 2), Scott Sumner (1, 2, 3), Bill Woolsey, and Matt Yglesias have been debating questions of saving versus investment and paradoxen of thrift. See also JW Mason in the comments here, and Simon Wren-Lewis a while back. Cullen Roche reminds us that, even under conventional definitions, the accounting identity S≡I only holds for a closed economy without government spending, and of JKH’s useful tautology S=I+(S-I). [See Update below.] I think the recent recrudation of these issues owes something to Garett Jones’ and my conversation on capital taxation, which Jones…

  • Some followups on capital taxation

    Steve Randy Waldman
    3 Apr 2013 | 8:25 pm
    I’m going to move on to other things, but before I do, I thought I’d point to some very good commentary inspired by the previous post on capital taxation. You already know that interfluidity is like a really drab version of Playboy, no one reads it for the articles, the really good stuff happens in the centerfold under the fold, in the comments. The piece provoked smart responses on other blogs, Increasing Marginal Utility, Separating Hyperplanes, and Asymptosis. [1] Robert Waldmann points out that glib euphemisms like “the long run” lead one to overstate the case…

  • K is not capital, L is not labor

    Steve Randy Waldman
    18 Mar 2013 | 3:23 am
    Garett Jones wonders why a standard result in economics is not more widely entrenched, both in policy conversations and conventional wisdom: Chamley and Judd separately came to the same discovery: In the long run, capital taxes are far more distorting that most economists had thought, so distorting that the optimal tax rate on capital is zero. If you’ve got a fixed tax bill it’s better to have the workers pay it… Why isn’t Chamley-Judd more central to economic discussion? Why isn’t it part of the canon that all economists breathe in? Why isn’t it in our…
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    Jeff Matthews Is Not Making This Up

  • DealBook Question Already Answered on Amazon.com

    Jeff Matthews
    22 May 2013 | 5:54 am
     Another day, another “Is Warren Buffett is Irreplaceable?” article.   Today’s version, however, carries the imprimatur of the New York Times’ “DealBook” column, and it’s written by a professor to boot.  The gist of the professor’s case appears right in the first two paragraphs, as follows: Acquisitions usually come with a nice premium for the seller. But when Warren E. Buffett is the buyer, there is typically something of a discount. The ability to make acquisitions on favorable terms is a testament to Mr. Buffett’s personality…

  • “We Want to Win”: The Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, 2013 Edition

    Jeff Matthews
    6 May 2013 | 5:52 am
     Well props to ‘CD 105.9’ is all I can think, driving east on Dodge Street in a cold rain to the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting early on a dark Saturday morning.  The reason for my good mood?  The Omaha “classic rock” station I’ve had my rental car radio set to the last three days is playing “Back in the USSR,” making this the first time I’ll have been to a Berkshire meeting with Paul McCartney’s Beatles-era send-up of communist Russia ringing in my ears. “Let me hear your balalaikas ringing out/come and keep your Comrade warm/I’m back in…

  • England Before Thatcher: The NotMakingThisUp Book Review of Richard Hell’s “I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp”

    Jeff Matthews
    14 Apr 2013 | 2:28 pm
     Richard Hell—look him up, kids—aspired to be a writer, became one of the originals of the 1970s New York punk scene, and is now a writer. And he is a very good writer if  “I Dreamed…” is any indication.  In fact, it’s probably the best rock and roll memoir you can find out there—and we here at NotMakingThisUp read them all (he’s not kidding—ed.) By way of comparison, Gregg Allman’s recent “My Cross to Bear” is one of those as-told-to memoirs whose primary focus is on the hair-raising amount of drug intake that ruined him (not to mention…

  • The Best Stock-Picker I Ever Knew

    Jeff Matthews
    25 Mar 2013 | 2:11 pm
     The best stock-picker I ever knew died last week.   You never heard of him.  He did not yack about his picks in Barron’s annual Roundtable or chat up his latest buy with the talking heads on CNBC, and he certainly wasn’t posting anything on message boards—he actually didn’t use a computer. In fact, he still used a rotary phone in his house. The way he picked stocks was also from the dark ages: he combed the stock tables in the Wall Street Journal, looking for a very specific thing he liked to see in a stock. When he found that thing he…

  • “The New JCP”: Insider Sells, Chumps Buy

    Jeff Matthews
    5 Mar 2013 | 2:02 pm
     The most inadvertently amusing rumor we’ve heard since—well, since the rumor that Richard Schulze had plenty of backers to lever up Best Buy (reported repeatedly, and wrongly, by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, as detailed here)—was today’s breathless rumor that JC Penney was either going to be put up for sale, or its CEO Ron Johnson, who lost his considerable Apple-related mojo trying to turn around the aging department store chain, was going to be fired. Here’s how Briefing.com reported it at 3:11 p.m. E.S.T.: J.C. Penney seeing pop higher on volume  (15.35…
 
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    Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

  • Another Look at Bernanke's Employment Recovery in Chart Form

    24 May 2013 | 12:38 am
    Reader Tim Wallace took note of Bernanke's testimony on jobs (see Bernanke's Semi-Annual Tap-Dance of Distortions, Half-truths, Lies, and Hypocrisy to U.S. Congress) and sent me the following chart. April Employment vs. April Employment in Previous Years click on chart for sharper image Tim writes ... Hello Mish Bernanke was touting the direction of employment using the familiar "7.5%" numbers and pointing to all the improvement. While granting that more people are working now than in 2010, we recognize that more people are working part time and less people are working overall than in 2008.

  • France Private Sector Implosion Continues

    23 May 2013 | 10:36 pm
    Here's some news that caught my eye earlier today when I was on the road: The Markit Flash France PMI® shows French private sector output continues to fall at marked rate in May. Key points: Flash France Composite Output Index unchanged at 44.3 Flash France Services Activity Index unchanged at 44.3 Flash France Manufacturing PMI rises to 45.5 (44.4 in April), 9-month high Flash France Manufacturing Output Index up to 44.3 (44.1 in April), 9-month high Summary: The downturn in French private sector output continued in May. Unmoved from April’s reading, the Markit Flash France Composite…

  • Another Warning Call for Depositors! Bank of Spain Says Spanish Banks Need €10bn More Loan Loss Provisions; Mish Asks €10bn or €100bn?

    23 May 2013 | 12:34 pm
    Here's an optimistic headline on the Financial Times that could easily be off by a factor of 10 or more: Spain’s banks need €10bn more provisions. Spanish banks will need to put aside extra provisions of up to €10bn to cover loans that borrowers will struggle to repay, according to an internal estimate by the Bank of Spain. According to recent data, Spanish banks rolled over more than €200bn of loans before they expired – often because corporate borrowers would be unable to repay their debt on time and in full. The €10bn estimate is the first official assessment of the likely…

  • Christine Lagarde, Head of IMF, In Court Facing Questions on Embezzlement and Fraud

    23 May 2013 | 10:47 am
    Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, is in court today addressing her role in a $366 million payout to Bernard Tapie, a close friend of former president Nicolas Sarkozy who was also Lagarde's boss at the time. Lagarde was Sarkozy's finance minister. Reuters reports IMF's Lagarde in court for French arbitration case. IMF chief Christine Lagarde was questioned in court by French magistrates on Thursday over her role in a 285-million-euro ($366 million) arbitration payment made to a supporter of former president Nicolas Sarkozy. Lagarde risks being placed under formal investigation at the hearing…

  • Japanese Bond Rout Continues; BoJ Vows to Curb Bond Turbulence; Curbing Turbulence is Theoretically Easy

    23 May 2013 | 8:42 am
    Curve Watchers Anonymous has been watching a major selloff in Japanese bonds. Here are a couple charts to consider. 10-Year Japanese Government Bond Yield 5-Year Japanese Government Bond Yield Since March 4, the 5-year yield has gone from 0.1% to 0.43%. Although a mere .33 percentage points, the move represents a 330% percent rise in in yield. One Month Changes Charts courtesy of Bloomberg Note: Those charts were snapshots taken last evening. This morning, yields have settled down, for now. Bank of Japan Vows to Curb Bond Turbulence NewsDay reports Bank of Japan vows market steps to curb bond…
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    Overcoming Bias

  • French Fertility Fall

    Robin Hanson
    23 May 2013 | 1:15 pm
    Why do we have fewer kids today, even though we are rich? In ancient societies, richer folks usually had more kids than poorer folks. Important clues should be found in the first place where fertility fell lots, France from 1750 to 1850. The fall in fertility seems unrelated to contraception and the fall in infant mortality. England at the time was richer, less agrarian and more urban, yet its fertility didn’t decline until a century later. The French were mostly rural, their farming was primitive, and they had high food prices. A new history paper offers new clues about this early…

  • Best To Mix Odd, Ordinary

    Robin Hanson
    22 May 2013 | 9:45 am
    “The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories.” … Psychologists say that’s because a conspiracy theory isn’t so much a response to a single event as it is an expression of an overarching worldview. (more; HT Tyler) Some people just like to be odd. I’ve noticed that those who tend to accept unusual conclusions in one area tend to accept unusual conclusions in other areas too. In addition, they also tend to choose odd topics on which to have opinions, and base their odd conclusions on odd methods, assumptions, and sources. So…

  • Thought Crime Hypocrisy

    Robin Hanson
    21 May 2013 | 7:20 am
    Philip Tetlock’s new paper on political hypocrisy re thought crimes: The ability to read minds raises the specter of punishment of thought crimes and preventive incarceration of those who harbor dangerous thoughts. … Our participants were highly educated managers participating in an executive education program who had extensive experience inside large business organizations and held diverse political views. … We asked participants to suppose that scientists had created technologies that can reveal attitudes that people are not aware of possessing but that may influence…

  • Imagining Futures Past

    Robin Hanson
    18 May 2013 | 4:50 pm
    Our past can be summarized as a sequence of increasingly fast eras: animals, foragers, farmers, industry. Foragers grew by a factor of about four hundred over two million years, farmers grew by a factor of about two hundred over ten thousand years, and the industry economy has so far grown by a factor of about eight hundred over three hundred years. If this trend continues then before this era grows by another factor of a thousand, our economy should transition to another even faster growing era. I saw the latest Star Trek movie today. It struck me yet again that such stories, set two…

  • High Road Doubts

    Robin Hanson
    16 May 2013 | 1:00 pm
    According to the intellectual norms that I learned when young, there is a high road and a low road for proposing reforms. The low road is populist and pandering – you ignore critics and try anything to get folks who could do something excited about your idea – sex appeal, group loyalties, demonizing opponents, overselling gains, whatever it takes. The high road is elitist and analytical – you carefully write up arguments, ideally with math models, randomized trials, and stat analysis, and present them to elites for evaluation. Academics usually see the low road as deceptive…
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    A Dash of Insight

  • The Fed as a Fig Leaf

    oldprof
    23 May 2013 | 8:41 pm
    Everyone who has been wrong about the market has now joined in a familiar refrain: The Fed is printing money. It is the only thing holding up stocks. It will all end badly. Background A little research on these sources shows that – as of a few months ago – their take on the Fed included the following: The Fed is irrelevant The Fed is pushing on a string The Fed is in a box The effectiveness of QE has declined with each new round. When the various bearish predictions have not played out, the same sources come up with a NEW VERSION of the theory. In this revised story, no one could possibly…

  • Weighing the Week Ahead: Are You Ready for Some Fedspeak?

    oldprof
    18 May 2013 | 7:19 pm
    Ready or not, we should expect a week dominated by an even greater focus on Fed policy. There are four reasons: The economic data calendar is very light; Earnings season has ended; Many will be heading for the exits early, anticipating a holiday weekend; and finally Bernanke testifies on the economy before the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. There will also be other Fed speeches and the minutes of the last FOMC meeting. What should we expect? Fedspeak is described by former Fed Vice-Chair Alan Blinder as "a turgid dialect of English." In the Greenspan era, the Fed Chair was…

  • A Flaw in the Tepper Analysis

    oldprof
    14 May 2013 | 7:26 pm
    When David Tepper speaks, the market listens. In Autumn, 2010, Tepper, the highly successful billionaire hedge fund manager, explained that for stock investors, the Fed had your back. Using options jargon he said that there was a "put" (downside protection) regardless of what the economy did. While causation is always hard to prove, the comments came on a 2% rally day in the market and the rally continued from there. Today Tepper went public again, with a very bullish prognosis. A key part of his analysis was that the Fed purchases under QE, even if tapered off, would be greater…

  • Weighing the Week Ahead: Are Consumers Ready to Buy? What about Housing?

    oldprof
    11 May 2013 | 8:05 pm
    The economic recovery, to the surprise of nearly everyone, has been consumer-driven. This has occurred despite increased savings and an overall improvement in household balance sheets. Businesses have been cautious to invest and to hire. State and local governments have been slashing spending and employees. I expect a week with a consumer focus. It starts with data on retail sales, expected to be weaker from the payroll tax increase and lower gasoline spending. It ends with the important indicators on housing. There are several possible themes this week, but I expect the role of the consumer…

  • Earnings Season and the Dog that Did Not Bark

    oldprof
    8 May 2013 | 6:38 pm
    As the Q113 earnings season reaches its close, there is a consensus around many conclusions: Earnings are growing at a rate less than the stock market. The P/E multiple is higher. Is this justified? Earnings exceeded expectations only because those expectations had been reduced. Is this a charade – the dance of the Wall Street analysts? Revenue was very disappointing. Companies were beating on the bottom line while missing on the top line. Can this continue? Corporations presented varying levels of confidence. Some saw a strong future, while many were more cautious. What does this tell us…
 
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    SeekingAlpha.com: Home Page

  • Campbell Soup's Solid Results Continue

    24 May 2013 | 12:48 am
    By Valuentum: Packaged food and beverage company Campbell Soup (CPB) reported solid third quarter results Monday morning. Revenue, boosted by the acquisition of Bolthouse Farms, grew 15% year-over-year to $2.1 billion, modestly exceeding consensus estimates. Earnings per share were also a touch better than consensus expectations, increasing 11% year-over-year to $0.62 on an adjusted basis. Free cash flow year-to-date totaled $659 million, which is roughly equal to the tally during the same period a year ago.For a company in a mostly mature business, Campbell posted solid results in its US…

  • General Motors: Revving Back To Success

    24 May 2013 | 12:37 am
    ByFund Gurus:Long term investors in auto stocks will be only too aware of the sensitivity of these stocks having no doubt experienced large losses during the Credit Crunch. However, as the US recovery gathers pace, those investors brave enough to hold onto their shares, or even top up at the lows will now be reaping the rewards. One particular stock that I like is General Motors (GM). Before analyzing this stock in further detail I think it is first necessary to look at the Auto industry and history of GM and understand what has underpinned the market in recent years.Auto sales are a great…

  • Amgen: Financial Analysis And Valuation

    24 May 2013 | 12:26 am
    ByShankar N: Overview Amgen, Inc. (AMGN) incorporated in 1980 is a global biotechnology company that discovers, develops, manufactures and markets human therapeutics based on advances in cellular and molecular biology. Headquartered in Thousand Oaks California, the biotech major employs approximately 18,000 worldwide.Amgen operates in one business segment - human therapeutics with products primarily in the areas of supportive cancer care, nephrology and inflammation.The biotech major is led by Robert A. Bradway who is the chairman of the Board since January 1, 2013 and Chief Executive officer…

  • More Fed - It Never Ends

    24 May 2013 | 12:04 am
    By Tim Duy: Bloomberg is carrying an interview with San Francisco President John Williams. Williams reiterates the possibility that future policy moves may be up or down: “Even if we do adjust downward our purchases, it doesn’t mean we’re now in some autopilot of moving in the same direction,” Williams, 50, said in an interview yesterday in San Francisco. “You could even imagine a scenario where we adjust it downward based on good data and then adjust it back” if the economy weakened. Yes, the Fed can change policy in any direction. But I reiterate what I said earlier: I simply do…

  • Benjamin Graham's Rules For The Common Stock Component: Marathon Petroleum Corporation

    23 May 2013 | 11:56 pm
    ByJarrod W. Jacinth:I like things simple; I want to know within a reasonable amount of time if a stock is right for me. By narrowing our initial search to a few checks and balances we can prevent spending countless hours on researching a stock that in the end does not meet our tolerances for a sound investment.In the fifth chapter of The Intelligent Investors Benjamin Graham sets four simple criteria for a conservative foundation to picking the common stock component of our portfolio. There should be adequate though not excessive diversification. This might mean a minimum of ten different…
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    Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

  • Validation of Software for Bayesian Models Using Posterior Quantiles

    Andrew
    23 May 2013 | 6:41 am
    Every once in awhile I get a question that I can directly answer from my published research. When that happens it makes me so happy. Here’s an example. Patrick Lam wrote, Suppose one develops a Bayesian model to estimate a parameter theta. Now suppose one wants to evaluate the model via simulation by generating fake data where you know the value of theta and see how well you recover theta with your model, assuming that you use the posterior mean as the estimate. The traditional frequentist way of evaluating it might be to generate many datasets and see how well your estimator performs…

  • To Throw Away Data: Plagiarism as a Statistical Crime

    Andrew
    22 May 2013 | 6:27 am
    I’ve been blogging a lot lately about plagiarism (sorry, Bob!), and one thing that’s been bugging me is, why does it bother me so much. Part of the story is simple: much of my reputation comes from the words I write, so I bristle at any attempt to devalue words. I feel the same way about plagiarism that a rich person would feel about counterfeiting: Don’t debase my currency! But it’s more than that. After discussing this a bit with Thomas Basbøll, I realized that I’m bothered by the way that plagiarism interferes with the transmission of information: Much has…

  • Recently in the sister blog

    Andrew
    21 May 2013 | 6:53 am
    The end of Michelle Rhee. The relevance of statisticians to researchers in different fields of social science. Regression discontinuity. Free expression vs. not wanting to make anyone personally uncomfortable. Political coalitions are diverse (and there’s no use pretending otherwise). According to David Brooks, staying out of jail is a conservative value. I’ve heard of the IRB, but this is ridiculous. This will make Richard Florida very happy. I don’t know whether to call it communism or crony capitalism . . .. Concepts and folk theories. This should keep youall busy for awhile. The…

  • Evaluating Columbia University’s Frontiers of Science course

    Andrew
    20 May 2013 | 6:18 am
    Frontiers of Science is a course offered as part of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum. The course is controversial, with some people praising its overview of several areas of science, and others feeling that a more traditional set of introductory science courses would do the job better. Last month, the faculty in charge of the course wrote the following public letter: The United States is in the midst of a debate over the value of a traditional college education. Why enroll in a place like Columbia College when you can obtain an undergraduate degree for $10,000 or learn everything…

  • What happened that the journal Psychological Science published a paper with no identifiable strengths?

    Andrew
    20 May 2013 | 6:04 am
    The other day we discussed that paper on ovulation and voting (you may recall that the authors reported a scattered bunch of comparisons, significance tests, and p-values, and I recommended that they would’ve done better to simply report complete summaries of their data, so that readers could see the comparisons of interest in full context), and I was thinking a bit more about why I was so bothered that it was published in Psychological Science, which I’d thought of as a serious research journal. My concern isn’t just that that the paper is bad—after all, lots of bad…
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    Streetsblog New York City

  • NYC: City Close to Recommending Surface Road Replacement for Sheridan

    Stephen Miller
    23 May 2013 | 2:02 pm
    The city is close to recommending that the Sheridan Expressway, a short, sparsely-used interstate that community activists have targeted for removal for years, be transformed into a street-level roadway that opens land for new development and improves neighborhood access to parks along the Bronx River. Today, trucks going to Hunts Point follow the solid red line on the highway, but follow the dashed line on local streets. The plan to convert a section of the Sheridan Expressway to a surface road would also add direct ramps from the Bruckner Expressway at the blue circle. Image: DCP The news…

  • NYC: Cab Driver Seriously Injures Cyclist on Upper West Side

    Brad Aaron
    23 May 2013 | 12:59 pm
    A cyclist was struck and injured by a cab driver at 81st and Broadway this afternoon. A spokesperson said FDNY got the call at 2:20 p.m., and that responders transported a 35-year-old male in serious condition to St. Luke’s Roosevelt. A tipster who alerted us to the crash and took the photo said the victim was a delivery cyclist. She described the scene as “Bad.” Judging from the photo, the cab driver barely missed mounting the curb. NYPD confirmed the collision between a cab driver and cyclist and said there may have been a third vehicle involved, but had nothing more when…

  • NYC: Tonight: Speak Up for Better 125th St. Bus Service at Bill Perkins Town Hall

    Stephen Miller
    23 May 2013 | 11:05 am
    State Senator Bill Perkins is hosting an "Emergency Town Hall Meeting" tonight because DOT is proposing Select Bus Service improvements to 125th Street. Image: DOT Spurred by transit activists demanding improvements to 125th Street buses that often crawl slower than walking speed, DOT and MTA have been moving forward with a project to improve bus service along the major crosstown corridor. But last month, State Senator Bill Perkins sent DOT a letter [PDF] in which he said Select Bus Service improvements were a “failure” and demanded  that ”the agency slow…

  • NYC: How the Post Engineers Bike-Share Bashing, Facts Be Damned

    Brad Aaron
    23 May 2013 | 9:55 am
    It took a few days, but the Post found someone to go along with its bike-scare nonsense, according to the Post. SHELL GAME: A DOT agent swoops in to adjust bike-share docks in response to public input. Here’s the latest: “The bike racks present challenges to firefighters and frankly, trying to get around the city now is harder than ever before,” Uniformed Firefighters Association President Steve Cassidy said at a press conference in Manhattan. “I think that it is going to continue to impact response times for emergency vehicles in a negative way.” Cassidy cites…

  • NYC: City Council Candidates on the Issues: Cheryl Keeling, District 11

    Stephen Miller
    23 May 2013 | 9:25 am
    We continue our series on City Council candidates with a Q&A with track coach and businesswomman Cheryl Keeling, who’s running to represent District 11, covering Kingsbridge, Riverdale, Woodlawn, and Norwood in the Bronx. Tuesday we ran a Q&A with Andrew Cohen, who serves as a CB 8 member and legal advisor to Assembly Member Jeffrey Dinowitz; tomorrow we will run replies from activist and food wholesaler Clifford Stanton. Candidate Ari Hoffnung, a deputy city comptroller, told Streetsblog that he does not reply to questionnaires. City Council District 11 candidate Cheryl…
 
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    The Becker-Posner Blog

  • Security Surveillance Cameras—Posner

    Richard Posner
    22 May 2013 | 10:58 pm
    In the wake of the Boston Marathon attack last month, considerable attention is being paid to surveillance cameras, which played a key role in the identification of the two attackers; their identification led within days to the killing of one and the arrest of the other. Had they not been identified, they might have escaped from the Boston area and committed a terrorist attack in New York City or elsewhere.  Many businesses (notably banks) and even homes have surveillance cameras nowadays. Usually they are pointed at the interior of the building though sometimes also or instead at the…

  • The Internet, Surveillance Cameras, and Misuse of Big Data-Becker

    Gary Becker
    19 May 2013 | 5:26 pm
    Surveillance cameras, tax reporting, Internet-based data, emails, mobile phone records and their cameras are some of the more salient modern ways that provide information on individuals and organizations. Few object when banks and other organizations use surveillance cameras on their premises to deter theft and robbery. There is much greater concern when Internet companies like Google and Facebook use their vast stores of data to learn about the interests and other personal information, of the millions of individuals who use their services. Probably, however, the most serious threat is the…

  • The Rise in College Tuition and Student Loans-Becker

    Gary Becker
    12 May 2013 | 6:06 pm
    During the past 30 years tuition at American colleges has been growing at a fast pace. The increase has been greatest at 4-year private colleges and universities, and least at 2-year public colleges, but all college categories have had large tuition increases. For example, real tuition at the 4-year private colleges has more than doubled since 1980, while tuition at 2-year public colleges increased by over 50%. Many commentators have criticized these large tuition increases. Colleges and universities are said to be too greedy and are charging what the traffic will bear, or  colleges are…

  • College Costs and Quality—Posner

    Richard Posner
    12 May 2013 | 5:54 pm
    I graduated from Yale College in 1959. Tuition, room, and board at Yale in the late 1950s was $2000 a year; this year it is $60,000. Adjusted for inflation, this is a more than threefold increase. Average salary for a full professor at Yale went from $13,000 in 1959 to $186,000 this year (excluding medical school faculty), which after correction for inflation, an almost twofold increase. The rates of increase in these two variables varies from college to college, but I believe it is generally true that college costs have risen significantly faster than faculty costs. One thing that has…

  • Breakthough in the War on Drugs?—Posner

    Richard Posner
    5 May 2013 | 12:25 pm
    No, no breathrough. It’s true that earlier this week the White House released its “National Drug Control Strategy 2013,” heralded in some quarters as a breakthrough in national drug control strategy because it calls drug addiction a disease and promises to devote a higher percentage of federal drug control funds to treatment and prevention of drug abuse than in previous years. But a solid majority of federal drug control funds (58 percent) will continue to be devoted to the enforcement of the federal criminal laws, with their savage sentences, against participants in illegal-drug…
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    The Big Picture

  • Is Modern Life Making Us Dumber?

    Washingtons Blog
    23 May 2013 | 10:30 pm
    Forget “Peak Oil” and “Peak Credit” … Are We On the Downslope of “Peak Intelligence”?   Scientists say that we have much smaller brains than our ancestors had 20,000 years ago … and we might have gotten stupider since agriculture became widespread. Indeed, Huffington Post reports that we’ve probably gotten dumber than even our Victorian ancestors: A provocative new study suggests human intelligence is on the decline. In fact, it indicates that Westerners have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian Era. As for Dr. te Nijenhuis and colleagues, they analyzed…

  • Wealth On A Plane

    Barry Ritholtz
    23 May 2013 | 5:30 pm
    Jess Bachman Did you know that the 400 richest people in America are wealthier than the bottom 60%? The 1%, you say? More like the 1% of the 1% of the 1% — and you can fit them all on one 747 commercial jet. This video has the details

  • 10 Thursday PM Reads

    Barry Ritholtz
    23 May 2013 | 1:30 pm
    My thunderstorm afternoon train reading: • The Uncertainty of Risk (n+1) see also Adaptation (The Reformed Broker) • Jonathan Miller: Home Supply Limited by Americans Lacking Equity to Sell (Bloomberg) • Greenspan’s Market Persists (Alhambra Investment Partners) and How Much of a Dove Is Bernanke, Really? (Businessweek) • Oil Manipulation Inquiry Shows EU’s Hammer After Libor (Bloomberg) • The Mirage that is Financial Literacy (money&markets) • How Nations Tried to Keep Striving Migrants In (Echoes) • Nocera: Tim Cook’s reality distortion field (NYT) see also…

  • FRBNY Prez William Dudley on QE, Mandates

    Barry Ritholtz
    23 May 2013 | 11:00 am
    Your lunchtime viewing: Dudley Discusses Taper Decision, Mandates, Yellen

  • Percentage of SPX Stocks Over 200 Day Moving Average

    Barry Ritholtz
    23 May 2013 | 8:30 am
    Renaissance Macro Research, May 14, 2013   Jeff deGraaf, technician extraordinaire (formerly of Lehman now at Renaissance Macro Research) makes an interesting observation about the heavily overbought markets. Last week, the S&P500 had ~93% of all stocks trading over their 200 day moving average. Normally, this degree of overbought should lead to a correction. As you can see in the inset box, it sometimes does. However, if you are looking out a year, we see that over the past 3 instances, markets have been higher. The takeaway is that you should determine if you are a trader or an…
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    The Epicurean Dealmaker

  • Mr. Indispensable

    16 May 2013 | 6:42 pm
    “The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.” — Attributed to several indispensable men Fire Jamie Dimon. There, that got your attention, didn’t it? Seriously, folks, the brouhaha surrounding the upcoming nonbinding shareholder vote to separate the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer roles at J.P. Morgan is getting a bit silly. People are marshaling all sorts of weak, irrelevant, and disingenuous reasons on both sides to argue for and against the resolution. Hence we get ludicrous examples of access journalists asking a gaggle of powerful white men whether another powerful white…

  • Go Ahead, Live a Little

    12 May 2013 | 7:45 pm
    Longtime followers of this cut-rate opinion emporium will recall your Humble Bloggist to be a gushing fan of Financial Times management inquisitor Lucy Kellaway, whose rapier wit, ear for human folly, and impeccable judgment have always encouraged me to envision her as a modern-day Musketeer wielding a PhD in bullshit detection while sporting sensible shoes.1 Among her many other contributions to modern society, she presides over an occasional agony aunt column for victims of financial capitalism entitled, appropriately enough, “Dear Lucy.” As chance would have it, a recent inquiry…

  • Nothing Gold Can Stay

    5 May 2013 | 10:42 am
    Kawase Hasui, Spring Evening at Kintai Bridge, 1947 Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. — Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay” We have had one of the longest and most beautiful Springs in New York City this year I can remember. The flowers and blossoming trees seem brighter and longer-lasting than normal, although I have nothing but faulty memory to claim this as fact. Perhaps I have been more alert to signs of Spring…

  • In Praise of Jargon

    28 Apr 2013 | 8:14 pm
    CHAKOBSA: the so-called “magnetic language” derived in part from the ancient Bhotani (Bhotani Jib—Jib meaning dialect). A collection of ancient dialects modified by needs of secrecy, but chiefly the hunting language of the Bhotani, the hired assassins of the first Wars of Assassins. — Frank Herbert, Dune Normally, O Dearly Beloved, I am a fan of author and commentator Steven Poole’s witty takedowns of the silly, pretentious behavior humans get up to on occasion. I think I discovered him in medias res, skinning, gutting, and flambéing the “foodie” culture while it yet lived, and…

  • What Infinite Ocean

    21 Apr 2013 | 9:30 am
    “Men, finding no answers to the sunnan [the ten thousand religious questions from the Shari-ah] now apply their own reasoning. All men seek to be enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God’s universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.” “Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty.
 
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    The price of everything

  • Losing the loser’s game

    timprice
    20 May 2013 | 1:47 am
      “The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”   -       Ernest Hemingway.   “Recovery in sight, says departing Bank of England governor Mervyn King..”   -       The Daily Telegraph.   In one of the most powerful and memorable metaphors in finance, Charles Ellis, the founder of Greenwich Associates, cited the…

  • The tulip harvest is in !

    timprice
    13 May 2013 | 1:15 am
      “When the cover of a major financial magazine features a cartoon of a bull leaping through the air on a pogo stick, it’s probably about time to cash in the chips.”   -       John Hussman of Hussman Funds in his April letter.   Amsterdam, March 1637 (Ruyters): The latest Dutch tulip harvest is in, and experts confidently predict another bumper year for tulip growers and tulip investors alike. Billionaire hedge farmer Jon Paulsen is rumoured to have added hyacinths to his multi-strategy offering and has just launched a fund…

  • Still stuck in the Middle Ages

    timprice
    7 May 2013 | 1:17 am
      “We have Stone Age emotions. We have medieval institutions.. And we have god-like technology.”   -       Edward O. Wilson.   The BBC reported last week that researchers from IBM had created the world’s smallest motion picture after manipulating individual atoms with a scanning tunnelling microscope. They separately reported the proposals of two Dutch engineers to introduce self-lighting weather warnings on motorways, and a dedicated driving lane that could recharge electric cars as they passed over it. As artist Daan Roosegarde…

  • ‘An economics correspondent’ writes..

    timprice
    29 Apr 2013 | 1:25 am
      Keynesian economics: “the pseudo-scientific economics of averages.”   -       Friedrich Hayek, ‘A Tiger By The Tail: the Keynesian legacy of inflation’.   In 1816, the net public debt of the UK reached 240 percent of gross domestic product. This was the fiscal legacy of 125 years of waging war against the French – rightly, in my view. I mean, all that garlic – come on. So anyway, what happened next after Britain was landed with this crushing burden of debt ? The Industrial Revolution. Yes, in 1764 in the village of Stanhill…

  • Breakdown

    timprice
    22 Apr 2013 | 12:55 am
      “There are weeks when decades happen”   -       Title of Goldman Sachs Commodities Update, 16th April 2013.   Human beings are essentiallypattern-recognition engines. We are hard-wired to recognise patterns, shapes and trends. Evolutionarily, this presumably yielded our ancestors benefits in the form of helping them to anticipate shifts in weather and the seasons, or to identify potential predators or sources of food. Human beings also have a longstanding appreciation of stories. So when we encounter moments of high drama, both of…
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    VoxEU.org: Recent Articles

  • The case for 4% inflation

    23 May 2013 | 5:00 pm
    Laurence Ball, 24 May 2013Since the double-digit inflation of the 1970s, central banks have sought to reduce inflation and keep it low. This column argues that recent history teaches us that inflation has fallen too low. Raising inflation targets to 4% would have little cost, and it would make it easier for central banks to end future recessions.Full Article: The case for 4% inflation

  • Are Germans poorer than other Europeans? The principal Eurozone differences in wealth and income

    23 May 2013 | 5:00 pm
    Giovanni D'Alessio, Romina Gambacorta, Giuseppe Ilardi, 24 May 2013The ECB’s recent survey on household finances and consumption threw up some unexpected results – counter-intuitively, the average German household has less wealth than the average Mediterranean household. In line with a recent VoxEU.org contribution from De Grauwe and Ji, this article analyses the principal differences in wealth and income between the main Eurozone countries..Full Article: Are Germans poorer than other Europeans? The principal Eurozone differences in wealth and income

  • The banking crisis as a giant carry trade gone wrong

    22 May 2013 | 5:00 pm
    Viral Acharya, Sascha Steffen, 23 May 2013A pernicious aspect of the Eurozone crisis is the ‘doom loop’ linking European banks and governments. This column argues that poor European policy choices in the wake of the 2008 Global Crisis worsened the problem. Rather than being forcefully recapitalised as in the US and UK, many Eurozone banks were left undercapitalised and free to gamble for redemption. In what may be the greatest carry trade ever, they borrowed cheap, first in short-term debt markets and then from the ECB, to invest in high-yield but risky sovereign debt. Substantial bank…

  • Service-sector reforms enhance manufacturing productivity: Evidence from Indonesia

    21 May 2013 | 5:00 pm
    Victor Duggan, Sjamsu Rahardja, Gonzalo Varela, 22 May 2013The ‘manufacturing matters’ movement has gained prominence on the policy agenda even as the nature of manufacturing continues to morph. This column discusses new research showing that opening service sectors to competition and foreign direct investment can be a powerful conduit for productivity gains in manufacturing. The gains depend on both the types of reforms and the specific services sectors in which these are implemented.Full Article: Service-sector reforms enhance manufacturing productivity: Evidence from Indonesia

  • Integrating monetary policy and macroprudential regulation

    20 May 2013 | 5:00 pm
    Otaviano Canuto, Matheus Cavallari, 21 May 2013The global financial crisis has shattered the confidence of many established principles of monetary policy and financial supervision. This column argues that the two should not remain separate, and maps out the major challenges faced by their complementary implementation.Full Article: Integrating monetary policy and macroprudential regulation
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    Cafe Hayek

  • Mid-20th-Century America: Not an Ideal Type

    Don Boudreaux
    23 May 2013 | 12:47 pm
    Today I start a new series here at the Cafe.  It’s a series featuring television commercials from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s – those decades in which America’s middle-class allegedly reached the peak of their economic affluence before beginning the long stagnation that, now having lasted at least three decades, continues today.  (Regular Cafe patrons know that Russ and I do not believe that the evidence supports this thesis of middle-class economic stagnation – a thesis that Mark Perry and I challenged earlier this year in the pages of the Wall Street…

  • The Curse of Aggregation Strikes Again

    Don Boudreaux
    23 May 2013 | 6:08 am
    Here’s a letter to an e-mail correspondent: 23 May 2013 Mr. Denis D___ Dear Mr. D___: Thanks for your e-mail explaining your “black hole theory of the minimum wage.” A critical part of your theory, as I understand it (with help from the link you sent to a video of Sen. Elizabeth Warren talking about wages and worker productivity), is that the minimum wage hasn’t risen by as much as has overall worker productivity.  Supply and demand, therefore, presumably aren’t working for low-skilled workers. Ms. Warren and you are correct that worker pay in the long run is…

  • Quotation of the Day…

    Don Boudreaux
    23 May 2013 | 4:11 am
    … is from Sheldon Richman’s blog post yesterday at Explore Freedom: Opponents of government regulation argue that artificially raising the costs of manufacturing in poor countries would harm intended beneficiaries by destroying jobs.  If so, workers would face worse options, including life on the streets and prostitution. Unfortunately, the debate is unnecessarily narrow. What needs discussing – and radical changing – is the country’s political-economic system, which benefits elites while keeping the mass of people down.  The economists are correct that under the…

  • Thoughts on the Too-Easy Use of the Word “Greed”

    Don Boudreaux
    23 May 2013 | 3:42 am
    While driving yesterday I listened for a while to ESPN radio.  Among the topics that the show’s hosts explored was greed – in particular, the “greed” of professional sports franchises such as the Washington Redskins and the New York Yankees to produce and sell to fans ever-more logo-ladened paraphernalia.  Some of the radio hosts were more sensible than others, but every one of them assumed without question that “greed” is the appropriate term to use to describe the motivation of owners of pro sports teams to earn more money by supplying more of the likes…

  • Quotation of the Day…

    Don Boudreaux
    22 May 2013 | 10:23 am
    … is from page three of the original edition of Henry Hazlitt’s classic – and still very relevant – 1946 volume, Economics in One Lesson; indeed, the lines below form the book’s opening passage: Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man.  This is no accident.  The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine – the special pleading of selfish interests.
 
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    Dollars & Sense Blog

  • Grover Norquist is Right to Oppose Internet Sales Taxes

    Polly Cleveland
    19 May 2013 | 4:23 am
    When I visited my brother in London a few years back, I toted a suitcase packed with tennis balls. I paid New York City’s 8 ½ % sales tax to help my brother’s tennis-mad family avoid the UK’s 20% value-added tax, or VAT, Europe’s big brother to our sales tax. In the last 40 years, mostly at Republican initiative, many US states and localities have dramatically increased sales taxes at the expense of property taxes. Only four states, Delaware, New Hampshire, Oregon and Montana, have no sales taxes; southern states generally charge the most. (Arizona tops out with a combined state and…

  • Pollin, Gini, Retro, Ferguson, etc.

    Chris Sturr
    10 May 2013 | 12:29 pm
    Ok, here’s what’s been on the back burner; no image today because I am posting three videos: (1) Pollin on R&R on the Real News Network:  A nice overview of the Rogoff and Reinhart controversy, by one of the co-authors of the paper that brought them down, frequent D&S author Bob Pollin: And for laughs, in case you haven’t seen it: the appearance of Thomas Herndon, the grad student who co-authored the paper that took down R&R, on the Colbert show (sorry–these are two weeks old by now): Part 1: Part 2: I love when he calls them “Rogaine &…

  • New Issue! Measuring Economic Indicators

    Chris Sturr
    8 May 2013 | 3:13 pm
    May/June 2013 cover I have a bunch of stuff I want to blog about, but we have been busy finalizing our May/June issue for the printers.  We’ve sent it off and subscribers should receive their paper copies within about ten days. E-subscribers, you’ll get yours tomorrow–too tired to sort out the list and finalize the color version tonight.  Not a subscriber? You can subscribe today, here! Please consider subscribing at the sustainer level–we always need the help! As you can figure out from the cover, the theme of this issue is economic indicators–in four of our…

  • May Day! Rana Plaza (Bangladesh) Hall of Shame

    Chris Sturr
    1 May 2013 | 7:24 am
    Pyramid of the Capitalist System Happy International Workers’ Day!  This will be a quick post, since my laptop seems to be celebrating May Day with a slow-down and occasional work stoppage.  Mostly I have been wanting to post this first one: (1) Shame on Matt Yglesias:  Slate columnist Matt Yglesias has been getting some well-deserved criticism for a truly rancid post he wrote after the recent factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh, which killed more than 300 workers.  One’s stomach starts to turn just reading the title of the post: Different Places Have Different Safety Rules…

  • Oligarchs, BAdidas Victory, Retirement Scam, etc.

    Chris Sturr
    25 Apr 2013 | 3:49 pm
    Slave Ship (1) Oligarchs on the Titanic:  Via Naked Capitalism, this clip of Robert Johnson of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (watch the video or read the transcript, which follows the video), with the striking metaphor of oligarchs staring into each others’ eyes on the deck of the Titanic: Transcript Robert Johnson: I think the, call it the oligarchy now is audacious. They don’t really care if they’re legitimate. There was a time – you know, I always hear Jurgen Habermas was paraphrased by saying, “Legitimate if you can, coerce if you have to, and accommodate if you…
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    Japan Economy Watch

  • The Real Experiment That Is Being Carried Out In Japan

    Edward Hugh
    13 May 2013 | 9:06 am
    The future never resembles the past - as we well know. But, generally speaking, our imagination and our knowledge are too weak to tell us what particular changes to expect. We do not know what the future holds. Nevertheless, as living and moving beings, we are forced to act. - John Maynard Keynes Discussions of the population problem have always had the capacity to stir up public sentiment much

  • The A-b-e Of Economics

    Edward Hugh
    1 May 2013 | 11:02 am
    And the world said "Let Shinzo Abe be", and all was light. “The point is not that I have an uncanny ability to be right; it’s that the other guys have an intense desire to be wrong. And they’ve achieved their goal.” Paul Krugman A new craze is sweeping the planet. The image I have in mind isn't exactly that of the community of central bankers all dancing the Harlem Shake in unison, but for

  • Japan’s Looming Singularity

    Edward Hugh
    11 Feb 2013 | 11:21 am
     by Claus Vistesen and Edward Hugh According to Wikipedia, in complex analysis an essential singularity of a function is a "severe" singularity near which the function exhibits extreme behavior. The category essential singularity is a "left-over" or default group of singularities that are especially unmanageable: by definition they fit into neither of the other two categories of singularity

  • A retrospective look at Japan's banking crisis

    Scott
    28 Dec 2012 | 1:16 pm
    I recently stumbled across a research paper by Richard Koo titled "Japan's disposal of bad loans: failure or success?" The thesis of this analysis is that Japanese monetary/fiscal authorities handled their post bubble banking crisis relatively well compared to how the US has handled its banking crisis which began in 2008.  The paper contains a lot of good data so it is worth the time even if you

  • Japan breaking new ground in monetary policy

    Scott
    26 Dec 2012 | 9:51 am
    In his essay Missing The Big Japan Story - Tim Duy's Fed Watch, Professor Duy provides an in depth analysis of the implications of likely changes upcoming to that country's monetary policy. He states that "something much more significant is afoot - the possibility of explicit cooperation, albeit perhaps forced cooperation, between fiscal and monetary authorities.  The loss of the Bank of
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    Credit Slips

  • The IMF is Not/Not - NOT- Reviving Its Sovereign Bankruptcy Proposal

    Anna Gelpern
    23 May 2013 | 10:10 pm
    For all the hopers, dreamers, and scaredy-cats out there--Relax. The long-awaited IMF overview paper on sovereign debt restructuring is here, the first since 2005. And it does not revive the Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism (SDRM) proposal, which died in 2003 at the hands of the United States and the big emerging markets (or more politely, "failed to command the majority needed ... due to the members' reluctance to surrender ... sovereignty"). The new paper takes great pains to establish that the core political reality has not changed, even though SDRM would…

  • Equitable Mootness and Forum Shopping

    Bob Lawless
    23 May 2013 | 2:11 pm
    A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court denied cert in a case called Law Debenture Trust Co. v. Charter Communications, Inc. (No. 12-847). The issue was whether the Second Circuit had correctly applied the doctrine of equitable mootness to an appeal in the Charter Communications bankruptcy. Paul Allen -- yes, that Paul Allen -- held an ownership stake in Charter that should have been worth approximately zero because that is usually the value of an ownership stake in a bankrupt company. Charter, however, needed to retain Allen's voting interest in the company to avoid a default in its senior…

  • Ice Cube Bonds: New Paper on 363 Sales and Chapter 11

    Melissa Jacoby
    23 May 2013 | 1:18 pm
    FAC UT ARDEAT, begins The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner. It means "made to burn," the narrator learns (from that "gasbag . . . Chesil Jones"). Whether your preferred hurry-up 363 sale metaphor involves flames, ice, or a wagon full of rotting salmon, Ted Janger and I have just posted a draft of an article reframing the problems with pre-plan going-concern sales, and reallocating the risk associated with such sales. The abstract: Financially-distressed companies can melt like ice cubes. In Chrysler’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the finding that the debtor was losing…

  • Non-exempt Exempt IRAs and Undercompensated Chapter 7 Trustees

    Bob Lawless
    21 May 2013 | 3:03 pm
    Some chapter 7 trustees have found a problem that could affect thousands of IRAs, leading to the first post in a  two-post series on unintended consequences. A better reading of the law is that these IRAs should remain exempt from the bankruptcy process. Cases are wending their way through the court system, and until the courts resolve the issues, many IRAs may remain under threat. And, there is no guarantee the courts will agree with me on how the cases should be resolved. The situation begins with the 2005 changes to the bankruptcy law. One of the few ways these changes were favorable to…

  • MLEA at the University of Illinois

    Bob Lawless
    17 May 2013 | 2:41 pm
    On October 11 & 12, the University of Illinois College of Law will host the 12th annual Midwestern Law & Economics Association conference. The event consists of law professors and economists presenting papers with varying degrees of law-and-economics content, ranging from empirical analyses and formal economic modeling to legal philosophy and doctrinal papers infused with economic thinking. Paper submissions are due by August 1 and should be submitted to me at rlawless-at-illinois-dot-edu. More information can be found here.
 
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    The Aleph Blog

  • The Rules, Part XXXIX

    David Merkel
    23 May 2013 | 10:31 pm
    The trouble with VAR and other mathematical models of risk is that if it becomes the dominant paradigm, and everyone begins to use it, it creates distortions in the market, because institutions gravitate to asset classes that the model makes to appear artificially cheap.  Then after a self-reinforcing cycle that boosts that now favored asset class to an unsupportable level, the cashflows underlying the asset can no longer support it, the market goes into reverse, and the VAR models encourage an undershoot.  The same factors that lead to buying to an unfair level also cause selling to an…

  • The Rules, Part XXXVIII

    David Merkel
    23 May 2013 | 5:29 am
    There is probably money to be made in analyzing the foibles of money managers, to create new strategies by taking on the opposite of what they are doing.What errors do most money managers make today?Chasing performanceOver-diversificationBenchmarking / Hugging the indexOver-tradingRelying too heavily on earnings growthAnalyzing the income statement onlyRefusing to analyze industriesBuy newsy companiesRelying on the sell-sideTrusting management too much Let me handle these one-by-one:Chasing performanceIn writing this, I am not against using momentum.  I am against regret.  Don’t buy…

  • Goes Down Double-Speed (Updated)

    David Merkel
    22 May 2013 | 12:37 am
    A little more than two years ago, I wrote Goes Down Double-Speed.  I wrote it after the market had doubled from its lows two years earlier.  I want to update the piece and explain we have learned over the past 2+ years, and maybe discuss what could happen over the next 2+ years.  Anyway, here is the modified table of bull and bear markets:Since the last piece, the gains have come slowly, validating my comment, “But it would be unprecedented for the market to continue to advance at a 3% [per month] pace from here.”  In long recoveries, gains first come quickly, then slowly,…

  • The Rules, Part XXXVII

    David Merkel
    21 May 2013 | 6:41 am
    The foolish do the best in a strong market“The trend is your friend, until the bend at the end.”  So the saying goes for those that blindly follow momentum.  The same is true for some amateur investors that run concentrated portfolios, and happen to get it right for a while, until the cycle plays out and they didn’t have a second idea to jump to.In a strong bull market, if you knew it was a strong bull market, you would want to take as much risk as you can, assuming you can escape the next bear market which is usually faster and more vicious.  (That post deserves…

  • What to Do When Things are Nuts?

    David Merkel
    18 May 2013 | 9:45 pm
    I have not been a fan of this rally, and I have been selling into it.  I do have a rule for equity clients — cash never goes above 20%.  I have been close to that recently, and after rebalancing some companies that have hit the top of the weighting band, I have bought those companies with the lowest weights in the portfolio.  I have also added some stable companies in the recent past — Berkshire Hathaway, Ingram Micro, Validus Holdings, AFLAC, and CST Brands.My next quarterly reshaping comes up next week, and again, I will be looking at neglected industries in the market for…
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    Quoting the Crisis

  • Movie studios send fraudulent censorship demands over Pirate Bay documentary

    20 May 2013 | 11:37 pm
    Movie studios send fraudulent censorship demands over Pirate Bay documentary: Cory Doctorow, boingboing.net You’ll remem­ber last month’s news that Fox had sent fraud­u­lent take­down notices regard­ing my novel Home­land. This is hard­ly an iso­lat­ed inci­dent: the stu­dios rou­tine­ly exhib­it depraved indif­fer­ence to the inac­cu­ra­cies in their…

  • Congressional panel: Apple avoided billions in US taxes with global workarounds

    20 May 2013 | 11:34 pm
    Congressional panel: Apple avoided billions in US taxes with global workarounds: Xeni Jardin, boingboing.net “Even as Apple became the nation’s most prof­itable tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny, it avoid­ed bil­lions in taxes in the Unit­ed States and around the world through a web of sub­sidiaries so com­plex it spanned con­ti­nents and sur­prised experts, a…

  • Associated Press quietly nukes its dumber-than-dumb DRM-for-news...

    19 May 2013 | 10:22 am
    Associated Press quietly nukes its dumber-than-dumb DRM-for-news system Cory Doctorow, boingboing.net Do you remem­ber the Asso­ci­at­ed Press’s 2009 announce­ment that they had dis­cov­ered a magic-beans tech­nol­o­gy that would let them stop peo­ple from quot­ing the news unless they paid for license fees (for quotes as short as 12 words,…

  • Patent lawyers: Help! The evil Makers won’t let us apply...

    19 May 2013 | 10:20 am
    Patent lawyers: Help! The evil Makers won’t let us apply for bullshit 3D printing patents! Cory Doctorow, boingboing.net Two minor char­ac­ters from my novel Mak­ers have appar­ent­ly come to life and writ­ten an arti­cle for 3D Print­ing Indus­try. These two peo­ple are patent lawyers for Finnegan IP law firm, Wash­ing­ton, DC, which I don’t recall mak­ing u…

  • “Just How Useless Is the Asset-Management Industry?”

    18 May 2013 | 6:08 am
    “Just How Useless Is the Asset-Management Industry?”: Stephen J. Dubner, freakonomics.com An interesting article on the Harvard Business Review blog, by Justin Fox, on a topic that most investors already have a strong feeling (or should I say “bias”?) about. It may not, therefore, change anyone’s mind — but the fascinatin…
 
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    IMF Survey Magazine

  • IMF Launches Discussion of Sovereign Debt Restructuring

    23 May 2013 | 2:03 pm
    The IMF is taking a fresh look at sovereign debt restructuring, with a robust work agenda on this issue in the coming months, said Hugh Bredenkamp, Deputy Director of the IMF’s Policy, Strategy, and Review Department.

  • U.K. Should Restore Growth, Rebalance Economy

    22 May 2013 | 5:04 am
    The United Kingdom could boost growth by bringing forward measures already included in its fiscal plan, such as spending on infrastructure and job skills, the IMF said as it wrapped up its annual check of Europe’s third largest economy.

  • Conference Lays Out Roadmap for Caucasus, Central Asia

    21 May 2013 | 8:43 am
    Countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia should build on progress made over the past two decades and carry out significant structural reforms to lay the foundation for growth, participants at a conference said.

  • Economic Growth Moderates Across Middle East

    20 May 2013 | 10:57 pm
    Differences in economic growth across the Middle East and North Africa are expected to narrow in 2013, though economic conditions in the oil exporters and importers still differ, says the IMF in its latest regional outlook, which predicts growth at about 3.1 percent this year.

  • IMF Helps Promote Understanding of Capital Flows

    17 May 2013 | 9:48 am
    In a bid to support greater understanding of capital flows among government officials in Asia, the International Monetary Fund’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific organized a high-level seminar with Hitotsubashi University.
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    DailyFinance.com

  • America's First Big-City Bankruptcy of 2013

    Rich Smith
    14 May 2013 | 10:00 pm
    Filed under: Bankruptcy, Recession, Unemployment Rate, EconomyGetty Images In the early days of the financial crisis, banking analyst Meredith Whitney famously predicted the near-death experience of Citigroup (C). But when Whitney came back on the national stage to warn of a similar financial apocalypse striking the municipal debt markets in 2011, that warning fell flat. The wave of municipal bankruptcies never happened. The "hundreds of billions" of dollars lost to investors were not, in fact, lost. America dodged a bullet -- but none of that is going to help Detroit. The Motor City Stalls…

  • Can Congress Help Boost the Nation's Financial Literacy?

    Michele Lerner
    3 May 2013 | 10:00 pm
    Filed under: Recession, Personal Finance, U.S. Government, Education, Consumer IssuesGetty Images Late last year, the SEC released a comprehensive report on the state of financial literacy in the U.S. It looked at numerous studies and surveys on the topic, and came to a rather depressing, albeit not surprising, conclusion: Both children and adults are failing. In a 2008 Jump$tart Coalition survey, high school seniors (the most recent available) correctly answered less than half (48.3 percent) of the questions, an all-time low for the survey. College students fared a little better, answering…

  • U.S. Employers Create Fewer Jobs Than Expected in March

    Reuters
    3 Apr 2013 | 1:45 am
    Filed under: Recession, Economic Recovery, Job Market, Unemployment, EconomyJ Pat Carter/AP By Leah Schnurr NEW YORK -- U.S. private employers added 158,000 jobs in March, the smallest gain in five months and falling short of economists' expectations, a report by a payrolls processor showed on Wednesday. Economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast the ADP National Employment Report would show a gain of 200,000 jobs. The report came in below the lowest estimates in a poll by Reuters and was the smallest gain since October. Revisions to February's jobs gains were more positive, with the private…

  • Will Echo Boomers Save the Economy? Don't Count on It

    Adam J. Wiederman
    21 Mar 2013 | 3:25 am
    Filed under: Recession, Economic Recovery, Economy, Saving Some economists are predicting that Echo Boomers -- people born between 1980 and 1995 -- will save America's long-term economic future from disaster. Sure, the group is slightly larger than Boomer generation the gave birth to it (80 million compared to 77 million Baby Boomers). And they're better educated, optimistic about their future, and still have their peak earning years ahead of them. But is their future really that bright? Not as things currently stand. Dismal Balance Sheets In fact, Echo Boomers are starting off in a horrible…

  • Low-Wage Workers See Little Reason for Optimism, Survey Finds

    The Associated Press
    20 Mar 2013 | 2:40 am
    Filed under: Recession, Cost of Living, Unemployment Rate, Job Market, Layoffs, Manufacturing, EconomyMario Tama/Getty Images By JENNIFER AGIESTA and TOM RAUM WASHINGTON -- America's lower-income workers have posted the biggest job gains since the deep 2007-09 recession -- but few are bragging. As a workforce sector, those earning $35,000 or less annually are generally pessimistic about their finances and career prospects. Many see themselves as worse off now than during the recession, a two-part Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey of workers and employers shows.
 
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    The Baseline Scenario

  • Liberty for Whom?

    James Kwak
    20 May 2013 | 5:30 am
    By James Kwak I feel like I should have something deep and original to say about Corey Robin’s fascinating article on nineteenth-century European culture, Nietzsche, and the economic philosophy of Friedrich Hayek. In addition to the things I’m better known for, I studied European intellectual history at Berkeley, with Martin Jay no less, and I’m pretty sure Nietzsche figured somewhat prominently in my orals. But Robin has far surpassed my understanding of Nietzsche, which is almost twenty years old, anyway. The story, in very simplified form, goes like this. For Nietzsche,…

  • If the Fed Knows Banks Are Too Big, Why Doesn’t It Make Them Smaller?

    James Kwak
    14 May 2013 | 10:46 am
    By James Kwak The Federal Reserve is serious—about something. On May 2, The Wall Street Journal reported that regulators were pushing to require “very large banks to hold higher levels of capital,” including minimum levels of unsecured long-term debt, as part of an effort “to force banks to shrink voluntarily by making it expensive and onerous to be big and complex.” The article quoted Fed Governor Jeremy Stein, who said, “If after some time it has not delivered much of a change in the size and complexity of the largest of banks, one might conclude that the…

  • The Cost of (Equity) Capital

    James Kwak
    6 May 2013 | 4:30 am
    By James Kwak For years, the world’s largest banks have been up in arms over threats by regulators to increase their (equity) capital requirements. Making banks hold more capital, they argue, will force them to reduce lending and will increase their cost of funding, making credit more expensive throughout the economy. One of the chief defenders of the megabanks has been Josef Ackermann, CEO of Deutsche Bank until last year and also chair of the Institute of International Finance, which claimed that higher capital requirements would reduce economic output by a whopping 3.2 percent. Anat…

  • With Great Power . . .

    James Kwak
    1 May 2013 | 8:21 am
    By James Kwak A friend brought to my attention another example of how Excel may actually be a precursor of Skynet, after the London Whale trade and the Reinhart-Rogoff controversy. This comes to us in a research note from several years ago by several bioinformatics researchers titled “Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics.” The problem is that various genes have names like “DEC1″ or identifiers like “2310009E13.” When you important those text strings into Excel, by default, the former is…

  • Can You Say “Bubble”?

    James Kwak
    30 Apr 2013 | 9:00 am
    By James Kwak Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article titled “Foosball over Finance” about how people in finance have been switching to technology startups, for all the predictable reasons: The long hours in finance. “Technology is collaborative. In finance, it’s the opposite.” “The prospect of ‘building something new.’” Jeans. Foosball tables. Or, in the most un-self-conscious, over-engineered, revealing turn of phrase: “The opportunity of my generation did not seem to be in finance.” We have seen this before.
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    Howard Lindzon

  • What Type of Financial Investor Are You?

    Howard
    23 May 2013 | 8:03 am
    As Stocktwits puts its finishing touches on our new mobile apps for launch next month (forced team pressure), I have been rethinking sign in flow and profiles loading hundreds of new apps the last few months to see how the product design teams are thinking. As I mentioned in a blog post last month, the financial industry is stuck in mud. They think of traders and investors in terms of novice, intermediate and professional and also years of experience. At Stocktwits, we are speeding up the growth curve of traders and investors. I know this for a fact because I talk to thousands of investors a…

  • Tumblrnomics – The Winners of the Tumblr and Yahoo Deal are …..Web Entrepreneurs, Creatives and Angel Investing…The Loser is The Middle Class

    Howard
    21 May 2013 | 12:10 am
    In one sentence here is the Yahoo Tumblr Deal now that it is official: David Karp says ‘F@#k Yeah’…Marissa Mayer says ‘…he said F@#k Yeah?’ …Tech Bloggers says ‘F@#k Me!’ and Wall Street Says ‘F@# YOU!’ Here is the F@#k Yeah from Tumblr founder David Karp. From Marissa Mayer (CEO of Yahoo)We promise not to screw it up! Talk about two different stress levels! On the armchair quarterback side of the web, there is outrage, snark (oh dear god the porn…the porn), jealousy and some backslapping. I of course added my own snark:…

  • Everyone in the Chase Pool…Remember This Moment

    Howard
    19 May 2013 | 7:06 am
    My pal Josh has a fantastic post titled ‘Remember This Moment‘. PLEASE read it. Obviously I am a huge fan of Josh because of his style of thinking. In 2010-2012, thousands of Stocktwits peeps were uber bullish as we saw breakout after breakout in software, technology, biotech and other industries. I believe many thousands of us on Stocktwits have ridden this bull together. In February 2012, Josh had this great post up titled ‘Get your Shit Together‘. Turns out you were not chasing the market even than. You were early. When I sat with Brad Feld a month or so ago, we…

  • $1 Billion is Not Cool….$1.1 Billion is…and The Moustache is Back

    Howard
    17 May 2013 | 6:40 pm
    So YHOO buys Tumblr. Wow. Mazel Tov to the investors. Not that you are counting, but I am…that makes three $1 billion companies in 2007 and 2008 I passed on as an angel…ZNGA, Twitter and now Tumblr. Actually I asked David after this interview if I could invest $50,000 in his angel round and he quickly said no: I just ran into David by chance in San Francisco and we had a nice chat. I assumed he was there for the Google IO conference. I should have just asked him for a loan. My quick thoughts because I have been asked are that this is a great deal for YHOO and obviously a fantastic…

  • Overvalued, Overvalued, Overvalued…NOT the Location, Location Location of Markets

    Howard
    16 May 2013 | 8:28 am
    In April 2007, I Wallstripped Salesforce.com. It’s in my top 5 fave shows we made. Every time I hear the stock mentioned, I think about making the show and the run the stock has had since. It’s a quick watch with many lessons: One of the most used words outside of actual tickers the last 3 years on Stocktwits is ‘Overvalued’. It somehow makes investors and traders feel good about their positions or lack thereof as the markets romp in the United States. I cringe when I hear it used when talking stocks. LIQUID securities that you can fling around for a few shekels…
 
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    Information Arbitrage

  • What I've learned from Little League

    30 Apr 2013 | 2:15 pm
    As my friends know all too well, mine is a life immersed in baseball. Yes, there’s that venture investment stuff, but in between board meetings, team meetings, meeting new companies, staying in touch with my networks and breaking down the barriers to data entrepreneurship at Michigan and Columbia there is baseball. Both my kids are intense baseball players. My wife is a Little League executive (and holds a Ph.D in psychology, which helps) and division coordinator. And I am a long-time manager and coach of teams with kids ranging from ages 7-17, from Junior Minors all the way to Seniors.

  • Breaking through

    18 Apr 2013 | 12:43 pm
    I spend a bunch of time speaking at events, guest lecturing at friends’ classes and mentoring young people. It is something I feel passionately about and enjoy a great deal. I always try to be blunt, honest and unambiguous with my input, hoping that at least some of the take-aways will be employed by those hearing my words. But I continue to be surprised by the number of common mistakes made by start-up founders, and wanted to provide a short list of some of my hot buttons. Post-presentation behavior: When I (or someone like me, be they an investor, a well-know start-up founder, etc.)…

  • "Dear Friends, We are, no doubt, shocked by yesterday’s events at the Boston marathon. Many of..."

    16 Apr 2013 | 12:14 pm
    “Dear Friends, We are, no doubt, shocked by yesterday’s events at the Boston marathon. Many of us have friends or family who live there or were there for the event. All of us, as New Yorkers, know what it is like to have our city overturned by terror, or more recently, by a devastating event of nature. Our hearts are with those affected by the violence and its ripples of destruction and disruption. Today is Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. Yesterday was Yom HaZikaron, the Memorial Day for Israel’s war dead. The juxtaposition is intentional: a reminder of the relationship…

  • The response to the terror in Boston: Channeling for good

    16 Apr 2013 | 5:20 am
    Yesterday’s horrific and senseless tragedy in Boston stirred up many of the same feelings I had on a beautiful September morning almost 12 years ago. Sadness. Anger. Rage. Confusion. And simply Why? Why did this happen? How could it happen at a time of celebration, peace and personal and community achievement? Words simply don’t do the feelings justice. I went to Twitter to get more facts about what had happened, and then looked for the Tweets of my many Boston-based friends to see that they and their families were ok. Finally, my feelings washed towards empathy, understanding how…

  • Reflections on IA Ventures, 3.5 years in

    15 Apr 2013 | 7:13 pm
    I periodically write about my learnings as the leader of IA Ventures, principally to unlock what is in my head and in my heart. As an operating partner with people who are giving their lives to building their businesses and a financial partner with those who have entrusted us with their capital, this is a very serious undertaking. Sometimes I find it necessary to call a “time out” in order to reflect, assess and share. That time is now.  As I’ve written before, our most valuable resource is time, not money. Given this realization, we’ve continued to emphasize…
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    Economic Principals

  • Mark 400, mark 3000: What’s the difference?

    admin
    19 May 2013 | 2:41 pm
    For all the talk about scandals in Washington, the news that caught my eye was the differing treatment accorded the latest benchmark in the global warming debate. Atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million earlier this month, as measured by two monitors installed in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On the eve of the announcement, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal featured an op-ed, “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide.” An atomic physicist, William Happer, of Princeton University, and a geologist-turned-astronaut, Harrison Schmitt (who also served…

  • “Expansionary austerity,” in bad times and good

    admin
    12 May 2013 | 1:59 pm
    Enthusiasm for budget-balancing swept Europe in 2010 in the wake of the financial crisis, just as the Tea Party movement was taking root in the United States.  (See this four-minute history of the American events to refresh your memory.) The difference is that, in Europe, “expansionary austerity” was taking hold at the highest levels of government. In the United States, it did not. In April of that year, Harvard University professor Alberto Alesina told European Union finance ministers in Madrid that “large, credible, and decisive spending cuts” often had been followed by growth…

  • Reinhart and Rogoff, in Context

    admin
    5 May 2013 | 2:00 pm
    The list of genuine heroes of the financial crisis of 2007-08 is a short one, as opposed to the roll of pretenders, which is as long as my arm. High on the former are Carmen Reinhart, of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Kenneth Rogoff, of the university’s economics department. The recent controversy about an error in their arithmetic has kicked up a cloud of dust, but, when that dust has settled, will have done little to damage their standing. Their best-selling book, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, which appeared in September 2009, was a triumph,…

  • … and nine books of poetry, too

    admin
    28 Apr 2013 | 1:02 pm
    For three years as a young man, I worked for a business magazine in New York.  Fortune, Business Week, Barron’s were fast cutters in relation to the mighty vessel that was The Wall Street Journal, but none in those days sailed closer to the wind than Forbes (the present-day iteration bears almost no resemblance to it). Forbes was good because it had a great editor, James W. Michaels. Its annual “Yardsticks” issue was a pretty good statistical map of US industry, but the magazine’s real franchise consisted of what Michaels called “company stories,” sharp (sometimes glib) analyses…

  • How Not to Organize a Search

    admin
    21 Apr 2013 | 8:00 am
    In the aftermath of a very long week in Massachusetts, two things about the response to the Boston Marathon bombing seem clear. One is that command and control of the investigation was a mess. Rival federal agencies and police that couldn’t agree among themselves on Wednesday long enough to call a press conference overreacted Friday by shutting down some and eventually all of the city – then failed to find the fugitive. Political leadership, Gov. Deval Patrick in particular, seemed to simply stand aside. (Boston Mayor Tom Menino was sidelined with a broken leg.) With not much more than a…
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    Marginal Revolution

  • Questions that are rarely asked

    Tyler Cowen
    23 May 2013 | 11:41 pm
    In my email, from Eric Crampton: Imagine the following deal, which is entirely not on any PPF so it’s not really a deal anyway. But imagine it. Genie offers a button. Push the button, and it burns the last n years of every journal in economics, along with all knowledge that those results ever existed, though they can be rediscovered. At the same time, every potential voter is brought up to a thorough Econ 101 level of understanding of Economics. At what value of n is the deal no longer worthwhile? A decade? Two? Here is a related blog post by Eric.  And here is Eric in praise of New…

  • What did I learn from (another) re-read of Adam Smith?

    Tyler Cowen
    23 May 2013 | 11:25 am
    Here is my MRU video on precisely that topic. By the way, Brandon Dupont has done for us this excellent video on John Law.

  • From the comments

    Tyler Cowen
    23 May 2013 | 9:48 am
    Hazel Meade wrote: The banning of catastrophic-only plans infuriates me the most. Those are the only plans that are actually financially sensible for a healthy individual to purchase. Everything else on the market is a perverse by-product of the employer-based insurance system. Worst case scenario with a catastrophic-only plan is you end up with $10,000 in debt. That’s a debt load many times smaller than what the Federal government thinks students should take out to get a college degree. We’ll let you borrow $100,000 to get a sociology degree but, we think that $10,000 is an…

  • Assorted links

    Tyler Cowen
    23 May 2013 | 9:12 am
    1. Honeybees trained to find land mines. 2. Felix Salmon on bubbles, and Alen Mattich on bubbles, more from him here.  And here is Krugman on the Japanese stock market plunge. 3. Ross Douthat, on the relationship between social and economic inequality. 4. Is this what an interview with a very smart person looks like? 5. On the origins of Paul Scott’s masterpiece. 6. www.thecorner.eu, new English-language site on EU economics, from Spain. 7. Can we improve on the egg carton?

  • The economy that is Dubai (a different kind of driverless car)

    Tyler Cowen
    23 May 2013 | 4:06 am
    Thousands of the finest automobiles ever made are now being abandoned every year since Dubai’s financial meltdown, left by expatriates and locals alike who flee in a hurry because they face crippling debts. With big loans to repay to the banks (unpaid debt or even bouncing a cheque is a criminal offence in Dubai), the panicked car owners make their way to the airport at top speeds and leave their vehicles in the car park, hopping on the next flight out of there, never to return… Ferraris, Porsches, BMWs, Mercedes are regularly abandoned at the car park of Dubai International Airport,…
 
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    Brad DeLong

  • Michael Kinsley's Repeated Factual Errors: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

    J. Bradford DeLong
    23 May 2013 | 8:42 am
    Dan Drezner is sick of trying to reason with Michael Kinsley: Sometimes a factual error is just a factual error: I've spent a rather alarming portion of this week wading into intellectual pissing matches, so I'm loath to respond to Michael Kinsley's response to last week's brouhaha over austerity policies. But one paragraph does merit a response. After noting the backlash to his last column, Kinsley writes the following: There are two possible explanations. First, it might be that I am not just wrong (in saying that the national debt remains a serious problem and we’d be well advised to…

  • Kenneth Rogoff Is Smart Today

    J. Bradford DeLong
    23 May 2013 | 8:00 am
    Here: "Europe’s Lost Keynesians" by Kenneth Rogoff But I don't have time to react…

  • Michael Kinsley Says: Leave Ben Carson Alooooonnnneeee!!!!: Thursday "WTF?!" Weblogging

    J. Bradford DeLong
    23 May 2013 | 5:56 am
    Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Scott Lemieux: Did Michael Kinsley Invent the Concept of Same-Sex Marriage?: [T]his great moment in unwarranted self-aggrandizement: "The first known mention of gay marriage is an article (“Here Comes the Groom” by Andrew Sullivan) commissioned by me and published in this magazine in 1989." I… wow. I don’t mean to suggest that the Sullivan article wasn’t important in its way…. But “first known mention?” I don’t know what the very first was, but I do know that there were lawsuits claiming that bans on same-sex marriage were…

  • Liveblogging World War II: May 23, 1943

    J. Bradford DeLong
    23 May 2013 | 1:14 am
    Flying Fish - Dave Barry: In December 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor, a Pennsylvania dental surgeon named Lytle S. Adams thought of a way that the United States could fight back against Japan. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has undergone dental surgery that the idea he came up with was: attaching incendiary bombs to bats and dropping them out of airplanes. The idea was that the bats would fly into enemy buildings, and the bombs would go off and start fires, and Japan would surrender. So Dr. Adams sent his idea to the White House, which laughed so hard that it got a stomachache.

  • Noted for May 23, 2013

    J. Bradford DeLong
    23 May 2013 | 12:39 am
    Ben McLannahan: BoJ holds amid signs of economy ‘picking up’ | Paul Krugman: The point, I think, is that you can simultaneously fault the Fed and economists in general for failing to see this crisis coming, and ridicule the hedge fund guys for giving advice right now that is both ludicrous and dangerous. And you should | Martin Wolf: Global inaction shows that the climate sceptics have already won | Barry Ritholtz: GMAMX: Goldman Sach’s Muppet Fund of Funds | Robert Skidelsky: Austere Illusions | John Williams: Commencement Address: Economics Department: University of California,…
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    Dani Rodrik's weblog

  • What is wrong (and right) in economics?

    Dani Rodrik
    7 May 2013 | 1:12 pm
    The World Economics Association recently interviewed me on the state of economics, inquiring about my views on pluralism in the profession. You can find the result on the WEA's newsletter here (the interview starts on page 9). I reproduce it below. 1. How would you briefly state your perspective on economics? I would say I am pretty conventional and mainstream on methods, but generally much more heterodox on policy conclusions. I have never thought of neoclassical economics as a hindrance to an understanding of social and economic problems. To the contrary, I think there are certain…

  • Experts, knowledge and advocacy

    Dani Rodrik
    25 Apr 2013 | 7:52 am
    This is so absolutely brilliant and important: “One thing that experts know, and that non-experts do not, is that they know less than non-experts think they do.” It comes from Kaushik Basu, currently chief economist at the World Bank and one of the world’s most thoughtful expert-economists. Economists would be so much more honest (with themselves and the world) if they acted accordingly – letting their audience know that their results and prescriptions come with a large margin of uncertainty.  Public intellectuals would do so much less damage if they did likewise.  And if…

  • What the BRICS could do

    Dani Rodrik
    11 Apr 2013 | 10:29 am
    My newest Project Syndicate column is on the BRICS.  These countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – have little in common. Most prognostications suggested they would agree on very little. Yet they have surprised the world by proposing a New Development Bank to focus on infrastructure finance. This is a beginning, but is it a useful one? I suggest not. What the world needs from the BRICS is not another development bank, but greater leadership on today’s great global issues. The BRICS countries are home to around half of the world’s population and the bulk of…

  • The IMF a convert to Growth Diagnostics?

    Dani Rodrik
    5 Apr 2013 | 1:27 pm
    It’s surprising how the language of growth diagnostics and binding constraints springs up in all kinds of unexpected places.  The latest example is the IMF’s new report on jobs and growth. The IMF’s analysts say all the usual things about the primacy of macroeconomic stability and fiscal sustainability – no surprise there.  But then we get a plea for contextual analysis and recipes that sounds, to this set of ears, at least quite pleasing.  “There is scope,” the IMF says, for: More systematic diagnostic analysis of the growth and employment challenges and the…

  • On ideas, interests, and political economy

    Dani Rodrik
    17 Feb 2013 | 4:51 am
    This column on “The Tyranny of Political Economy” quickly rose to become the most-read piece on Project Syndicate – quite to my surprise, as it deals essentially with an academic subject. I take the recent rational-choice political economy to task for ignoring the role of ideas in shaping how vested interests see their “interest” and how these “interests” can best be carried out. It is in part self-criticism as well, as some of my earlier work was very much in this tradition.  The alternative title for the column was “Confessions of a One-Time Political Economist.” I…
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    bank-o-meter.com

  • Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - Have Another Cookie

    Sinclair Noe
    15 May 2013 | 4:13 pm
    Have Another Cookie by Sinclair Noe DOW + 60 = 15275SPX + 8 = 1658NAS + 9 = 347110 YR YLD - .01 = 1.94%OIL + .18 = 94.39GOLD – 33.30 = 1393.50SILV - .82 = 22.69 More record highs on Wall Street. We celebrate with milk and cookies, and remembrances of the days of rice and beans and tins of tuna. Record highs are fleeting, almost ephemeral. I know the trend is your friend; don't fight the Fed; a rising tide lifts all boats; yada, yada. Why is this starting to feel like an asset bubble? Stock Traders Daily did a comparison of quarter to quarter earnings and revenue growth rates for the S&P…

  • Tuesday, May 14, 2013 -

    Sinclair Noe
    14 May 2013 | 4:04 pm
    Booms by Sinclair Noe DOW + 123 = 15,215SPX + 16 = 1650NAS + 23 = 346210 YR YLD + .03 = 1.95%OIL - .94 = 94.23GOLD – 5.00 = 1426.80SILV - .24 = 23.51 So, we have record highs. I went back to check some of the earlier in the year predictions. Last December, Goldman Sachs was predicting the S&P 500 would hit 1625; sounded good, even a little bold back then. Of course, in the past week, we've blown past those numbers. Many experts are calling for a correction here. Maybe, maybe not. If your memory is still sharp, you'll recall a few weeks back I was talking about the “Sell in May”…

  • Monday, May 13, 2013 - Tapering Off – A Taste of Honey

    Sinclair Noe
    13 May 2013 | 4:18 pm
    Tapering Off – A Taste of Honey by Sinclair Noe DOW – 26 = 15,091SPX + 0.07 = 1633NAS + 2 = 3438 10 YR YLD + .02 = 1.92% OIL – 1.16 = 94.88GOLD – 17.30 = 1431.80SILV - .22 = 23.75The Murdoch Street Journal ran an article Friday claiming the Federal Reserve has mapped out a plan to exit Quantitative Easing, the Fed's $85 billion dollar per month bond buying program. The article said the Fed will cut its bond-buying program in careful and potentially halting steps, though the timing of when to start is still being debated. Now, you might think this is good news; the Fed thinks there is…

  • Thursday, May 09, 2013 - First We Start With A Military Bank

    Sinclair Noe
    9 May 2013 | 1:27 pm
    First We Start With A Military Bank by Sinclair Noe DOW – 22 = 15,082SPX – 6 = 1626NAS – 4 = 340910 YR YLD + .05 = 1.81%OIL - .71 = 95.91 Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 4,000 to a seasonally adjusted 323,000, the lowest level since January 2008; that's January 2008, not December 2008. The weekly report from the Department of Labor shows layoffs remained contained even as other parts of the economy such as manufacturing show strain from budget cuts in Washington. The improvement in employment contrasts sharply with other data, including retail sales and…

  • 8 May 2013 | 4:08 pm

    Sinclair Noe
    8 May 2013 | 4:08 pm
    Levitational Tools by Sinclair Noe DOW + 48 = 15,105SPX + 6 = 1632NAS + 16 = 341310 YR YLD - .02 = 1.76%OIL + .99 = 96.61GOLD + 21.80 = 1475.40SILV - .01 = 24.05 Another day, another record high. What's behind this? Nouriel Roubini weighed in from a conference in Las Vegas. Roubini is a professor at NYU and former Senior Economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisors, and notably, one of the few economists to anticipate the collapse in the housing market. Roubini identified the levitational forces, the forces lifting the markets, on “QE, zero policy rates, more money coming into…
 
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    About.com US Economy

  • Prices Dropped .4% in April

    20 May 2013 | 5:52 am
    Across the board, U.S. prices fell .4% in April, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. An 8.1% drop in gas prices offset mild price increases in most other goods and services. Used cars and trucks were up .6%, while new vehicle prices rose .3% as did the cost of going out to eat. Grocery prices only rose .1%, as did medical supplies. Health care services actually dropped .1% last month....Read Full Post

  • Shoppers Celebrate Spring, Boosting April Sales .1%

    14 May 2013 | 4:29 am
    Retail sales rose .1% in April, to $419 billion, after a .4% decline in March. Increases in spring-inspired categories, such as clothing (up 1.2%), gardening (up 1.5%) and sporting goods (up .5%) offset a 4.7% decline in gas station sales (a result of a seasonal drop in gas prices)....Read Full Post

  • Economic Shocks Are Inevitable, Says Bernanke

    10 May 2013 | 7:49 am
    In a speech to the banking community this morning, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned that economic shocks are an inevitable consequence of a free-market economy. That's because investors will always search to increase return in areas of the financial system that are less regulated. The government's role is to help banks to put enough cushions in place to absorb these shocks. This is all part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act....Read Full Post

  • Is the Yuan Replacing the Dollar as the World's Reserve Currency?

    10 May 2013 | 7:17 am
    A reader asks: Hi Kimberly, I came across this article today and wanted to run it by you. This makes it sound like China really has a large stronghold in world reserves and has stopped buying the dollar on top of their stockpiling gold. Couldn't this lead to a collapse of the dollar soon if true?...Read Full Post

  • Consumer Credit Up 3.4% in March

    9 May 2013 | 10:37 am
    As of the end of March, consumers owed $2.807 trillion in credit card and personal debt, a 3.4% increase over April.  It was driven by a 5.9% increase in personal debt, which is mainly school and auto loans. This set an new record of $1.96 trillion. It also offset a 2.4% decrease in credit card debt, which is now only $846 billion....Read Full Post
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    Economix

  • Debating Doctors’ Compensation

    By UWE E. REINHARDT
    23 May 2013 | 9:01 pm
    The value that society places of medical services is the best determinant of just pay for doctors, an economist writes.

  • The Changing Face of Community Colleges

    By DAVID LEONHARDT
    23 May 2013 | 7:34 am
    A Century Foundation report shows a sharp increase in enrollment of lower-income, nonwhite students at community colleges, institutions that will do much to shape the economy.

  • How a Big-Bank Failure Could Unfold

    By MARC JARSULIC and SIMON JOHNSON
    22 May 2013 | 9:01 pm
    All the talk of safeguards and international cooperation is likely to prove ineffectual if a huge international bank fails, two economists write.

  • Massachusetts Employees Will Keep Their Health Plans

    By CASEY B. MULLIGAN
    21 May 2013 | 9:01 pm
    Because the state's employees are relatively highly paid, the impact of Massachusetts' health care reform is likely to be different than that of the Affordable Care Act, an economist writes.

  • The Bush Tax-Cut Failure

    By BRUCE BARTLETT
    20 May 2013 | 9:01 pm
    No hard evidence has ever emerged that the Bush tax cuts stimulated the economy, an economist writes.
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    iMFdirect - The IMF Blog

  • Saving Latin America’s Unprecedented Income Windfall

    iMFdirect
    20 May 2013 | 7:30 am
    by Gustavo Adler and Nicolás Magud (Versions in Español and Português) Commodity exporting countries in Latin America have benefited strongly from the commodity price boom that began around 2002. And the accompanying improvements in public and external balance sheets have fed a sense that this time the macroeconomic response to the terms-of-trade boom has been different (and more prudent) than in past episodes. But, has it? In our recent work, we analyze the history of Latin America’s terms-of-trade booms during 1970–2012 and quantify the associated income windfall (i.e., the extra…

  • Banking on Reform: Can Volcker, Vickers and Liikanen Resolve the Too-Important-to-Fail Conundrum?

    iMFdirect
    14 May 2013 | 8:22 am
    by José Viñals and Ceyla Pazarbasioglu The global regulatory landscape governing banks has changed from its pre-crisis status quo. In addition to the Group of Twenty advanced and emerging economies led global regulatory reforms, like Basel III, the United States and the United Kingdom have decided to directly impose limits on the scope of banks’ businesses. The European Union is contemplating a similar move. We discussed these structural banking reforms a few weeks ago with officials from finance ministries, central banks, and supervisory authorities from around the world during the…

  • The Evolving Role of the Banking Systems in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe

    iMFdirect
    9 May 2013 | 7:15 am
    By Reza Moghadam What has been the role of foreign banks in financing growth and convergence in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and how is that role changing? This is discussed in the first issue of a new series of analytical work on the region called Regional Economic Issues, which we launched at a joint IMF/Czech National Bank conference two weeks ago in Prague. In the 1990s, there were very few foreign banks—state-owned banks were dominant. Many countries went through severe banking crises. When banking systems were opened to foreign investors, foreign ownership quickly became…

  • Inclusive and Sustained Growth in Asia: The Role of Fiscal Policy

    iMFdirect
    8 May 2013 | 4:40 am
    By Anoop Singh (Versions in 中文 and 日本語) Fiscal management has improved in Asia over the past decade. It has become more responsive to economic conditions and thereby helped stabilize growth, especially during the global financial crisis. While these are important achievements, major challenges still lie ahead—as our latest Asia and Pacific Regional Economic Outlook points out. What are these key challenges? In a nutshell, fiscal policy can, and should do more to make Asia’s growth sustainable and more inclusive. In the near term, budget consolidation has to proceed as the…

  • After a Golden Decade, Can Latin America Keep Its Luster?

    iMFdirect
    6 May 2013 | 9:40 am
    By Alejandro Werner (Versions in Español and Português) Latin America continues to be one of the fastest growing regions in the world, even though growth slowed down a bit in 2012. Many economies in the region are operating at or near potential, inflation remains generally low, and unemployment is at historically low levels. In the near term, the region will continue to benefit from easy external financing and relatively high commodity prices. In our May 2013Regional Economic Outlook we project that the region will expand by about 3½ percent in 2013. In Brazil—the region’s largest…
 
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    The Principled Achiever

  • Borrower versus iBorrower, more context please!

    Clark Abrahams
    23 May 2013 | 6:07 am
    On Sunday I will travel to Ontario to present at the 20th Annual Conference of the Credit Scoring and Risk Strategy Association.  The conference agenda is action-packed!  My talk is on context preserved scoring, a term I recently coined to describe an enhanced credit scoring approach that is described in [...]

  • Buy HPA Now!

    Clark Abrahams
    29 Apr 2013 | 2:19 pm
    SAS Global Forum is taking place this year in my home town -- San Francisco.  I feel especially proud and moved by the words of Dr. Jim Goodnight, SAS CEO, who spoke at the event last night, telling customer attendees: "Our mission is to keep innovating to support the great [...]

  • Director decision making -- a sensible approach

    Clark Abrahams
    26 Apr 2013 | 1:51 pm
    Decision making in the board room is an interesting topic indeed!  In her blog post today entitled Guidance for Director Decisions, Alex Lajoux, NACD Chief Knowledge Officer, addresses the philosophical starting point for a new NACD publication entitled: Director Decision Making -- a Sensible Approach by putting a twist on [...]

  • Decision-making for the boardroom and beyond

    Clark Abrahams
    16 Apr 2013 | 9:43 pm
    Last Friday I co-presented a session on decision-making in the boardroom at the Research Triangle Chapter, NACD Directors College. There was a great line-up of speakers on a number of topics that corporate directors must deal with on a day-in and day-out basis. The NACD Directors College Agenda consisted of the [...]

  • Imagine HPA in an exascale world!

    Clark Abrahams
    7 Mar 2013 | 9:15 pm
    I will be sharing thoughts about high-performance analytics (HPA) next week in Southfield Michigan at the Great Lakes BI & Big Data Summit.  In particular, I will point to advances in computing technology that offer opportunities to re-think how people, processes, data, and systems can combine to create better outcomes for [...]
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    EconomicPolicyJournal.com

  • Gawker Attacks Ron and Rand Paul as Nutty

    23 May 2013 | 8:16 pm
    Because of this: Ron and Rand Paul circa 1965 Gawker writes:  If you're wondering how these two become so nutty in the 21st Century, all the clues are in this seemingly innocent photograph. Gawker has a problem because Rand isn't wearing a bike helmet and because the house in the background is brick.  They have other issues with the photograph, here. Maybe they are trying to be funny and

  • While Working for HBO, I Got Kicked Out of My Apartment and Fell in Love with a Bunch of Greek Waitresses

    23 May 2013 | 8:16 pm
    By James Altucher One time I tried to move into a homeless shelter in Pittsburgh. I had this image that it would be like some sort of sex dormitory. I would meet all of these homeless ex-prostitutes or lonely single mothers and we would sneak into each other’s rooms and fall in love. We would whisper really quietly to each other at night and it would be exciting and fresh and new. I asked the

  • Snapple Founder Dies at Age 80; A Non-Crony Capitalist

    23 May 2013 | 7:51 pm
    I wonder if he ever stepped foot in Washington D.C. WSJ reports: Leonard Marsh transformed a tiny fruit-juice supplier into Snapple, a national brand of fruit-flavored beverages and iced tea powered by quirky marketing and bold flavors. So successful was the brand that Snapple inspired dozens of imitators and prompted major soft-drink companies to introduce their own fruit and tea beverages to

  • Call Me a Crackpot Libertarian

    23 May 2013 | 7:50 pm
    By Murray Sabrin In his Star Ledger column, “Crackpot libertarianism at the convenience counter,” Paul Mulshine tries to make the case that Senator Richard Codey’s bill to increase the age to legally buy cigarettes from 19 to 21 is not an infringement on individual liberty.  He fails miserably. Mulshine writes. “…think about the fact that cigarettes annually kill more Americans than all of

  • Peter Schiff: The Object of a Currency War is to Kill Oneself

    23 May 2013 | 7:49 pm
    By Peter Schiff While the world's economies jockey one another for the lead in the currency devaluation derby, it's worth considering the value of the prize they are seeking. They believe a weak currency opens the door to trade dominance, by allowing manufacturers to undercut foreign rivals, and to economic growth, by fighting deflation. On the other side of the coin, they believe a strong
 
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    Visualizing Economics

  • Rolling Real Returns: Stocks, Bonds and Bills since 1928

    Catherine Mulbrandon
    21 May 2013 | 1:49 pm
    Revisited the Stock, Bonds and Bills data from my previous post, I created a set of real (inflation adjusted) average annual compound returns for rolling time periods (e.g. rolling 5-year returns: 1928-1933, 1929-1934, 1930-1935 etc...) I also included the average annual compound real return for 1928-2012: stocks 6.0% 10-year bonds 2.0% and 3-month bills 0.5%Some of the outliers in these returns are due to bubbles. For example stocks in the late 1920s, mid-1930s and late-1990s had unusual large real returns with a corresponding drop. See Long-term Growth Rate of US…

  • Annual Returns of Stock, Bond, and Bills since 1928

    Catherine Mulbrandon
    12 May 2013 | 8:27 pm
    Here is a simple graph comparing the variation of annual returns for US stocks, US 10-year bonds and US 3-month t-bills. I have included both nominal returns (not adjusted for inflation) and real returns. Stocks are of course the most risky of the three with both the highest and the lowest  returns then comes 10-year bonds and finally t-bills with the smallest but the most consistant returns. However, after 3-month t-bills are adjusted for inflation there are many years you will "lose" money. And in years…

  • What Has Happened to Middle-Income Households since 1945?

    Catherine Mulbrandon
    9 May 2013 | 4:40 pm
    I dug up at the US Census Bureau serveral reports about family and individual income and created a series of graphs plotting the income distribution of households under $100,000 a year adjusted for inflation. (Pages 17, 18, 19 from my Income Guide)I am defining middle-income households as $30,000-$80,000. One of the stories these graph tell is that for 20+ years after 1945 more households entered the "middle class". However, over the next 40 years, the percent of middle-income households shrank in part because the percent of households with more than $80,000 a year…

  • Inflation and Price/Earnings Since 1880

    Catherine Mulbrandon
    5 May 2013 | 9:34 pm
    Copies of this graphic can be purchased at ZazzleInflation is when prices go up. However, inflation's relationship to stock prices can be a little more complex. In this graph, I am revisiting historical data I used several years ago in a series of historical graphs looking at the stock market (see GDP per Capita vs US Stock Prices and Real Growth in Stock Returns Dividends Reinvested). I graphed the price/earnings ratio back to 1880 and highlighted the years that inflation was high and when there was deflation. The P/E is calculated from…

  • Ten Years of Job Loss in the "Information" Industry

    Catherine Mulbrandon
    1 May 2013 | 7:10 pm
    Let me begin with a disclaimer. This industry includes firms that are pure internet-based activities, like hosting and web searches as well as ones that are being disrupted by the internet like newspapers and broadcasting. Information Industry's share of GDP 1947-2010 Starting with the Information industry's share of GDP (from page 119 of my book), while it has grown over the last 50 years it is still around 4% of GDP as of 2010. However, the Information industry represents only 2% of the 170 million jobs in the US economy. In this treemap of…
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    Broad Oak Magazine

  • Will fracking help us - or hinder us?

    20 May 2013 | 11:12 pm
    AK Haart asks the more penetrating questions about the benefits of shale oil, over at The Energy Page.

  • Great new Energy Page pieces! Nick Drew on energy security, AK Haart on scientific uncertainty in climate studies

    14 May 2013 | 12:27 pm
    Nick Drew closes his latest series on energy threats in the UK - something that has suddenly become a focus of attention in the mainstream media, as for example in The Spectator's latest edition here. And we welcome a new voice to the Energy Page: distinguished scientific blogger and author AK Haart shows how "an inconvenient truth" may be inconveniently flawed, or unfairly ignored. AKH has been blogging regularly for two years and has taken a temporary (we hope) online vacation following the completion of his latest book.

  • Fighting the Government for savers and against inflation (3)

    9 May 2013 | 7:32 am
    The struggle continues...No reply to my email of 21 April (see Part 2 of this series) before I sent the following:Me to MP's researcher, April 27, 2013:Further to my last email of 6 days ago, perhaps you could spare the time to look at the latest article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. It may give you some idea of why I now (as a former IFA of 23 years' experience in the financial industry) regard the whole bank and trading shebang as irredeemably systemically corrupt. Any government that wishes to retain its claim to authority needs to protect the life savings of the little people.

  • SUCCINCT time management tips

    4 May 2013 | 12:35 am
    26 Time Management Hacks I Wish I'd Known at 20 from Etienne Garbugli @egarbugli (htp: Howard Getson)All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

  • The quiet collapse of the pound

    28 Apr 2013 | 8:29 am
     The forces ranged against the British pound may be so powerful that the government is in no position to offer inflation protection to savers. I show above what has happened over the past five years. Nominally, UK inflation has advanced by 17 or 18 per cent, depending on how you choose to measure it.  Gold has soared, and had already done so for some time before 2008, but it had been at a low point for a long time during the years of the phoney boom. I still feel that, bearing in mind the amount of extra money pumped into the economy, gold is fairly valued. But compared to…
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    Carl Futia

  • Attention Traders

    23 May 2013 | 7:45 am
    Since my trading seminar CarlFutiaRealTime started in September of 2010 the blog's day trading account is up 93% based on one contract trades in the e-mini S&P futures in a $10,000 account. Want to find out how I calculate my range estimates every day? Would you like to learn the rules I use to identify the market's trend and estimate support and resistance levels? Or how I identify trend direction by identifying rejections of support or resistance, highs or lows? You can do all this plus watch my real time trades for less than $25 per month! Check out my trading seminar…

  • Guesstimates on May 23, 2013

    23 May 2013 | 5:52 am
    June S&P E-mini Futures: Today’s range estimate is 1623-1645. I think the 1574-1587 zone defined by the 2000 and 2007 bull market tops is now support. The next upside target is 1775.  QQQ:  Next upside target is 76.50.  Support is at 72.00.  TNX (ten year note yield): Bond yields are going much higher as the market begins to anticipate stronger economic growth. The first upside yield target for the 10 year is 2.50%. Euro-US Dollar: The euro is still trading below it 20 day moving average and has spent several days below 1.2920 support. At this juncture I have to…

  • unusual? yes - unprecedented? no

    22 May 2013 | 10:45 am
    The 2013 stock market rally seems to go on and on with nary a correction to speak of. This is very unusual behavior but as the charts above show it it certainly not unprecedented.The top chart records the most extreme example of an uncorrected rally which I could remember since it made such an impression on me at the time. This daily bar chart shows the rally in the S&P 500 during the year 1995, the kick-off year for the internet bull market of 1995-2000. You can see that the S&P rallied all year without once dipping visibly below its 50 day moving average (green line in the…

  • Guesstimates on May 22, 2013

    22 May 2013 | 5:59 am
    June S&P E-mini Futures: Today’s range estimate is 1664-1677. I think the 1574-1587 zone defined by the 2000 and 2007 bull market tops is now support. The next upside target is 1775.  QQQ:  Next upside target is 76.50.    TNX (ten year note yield): Bond yields are going much higher as the market begins to anticipate stronger economic growth. The first upside yield target for the 10 year is 2.50%. Euro-US Dollar: The euro is trading below it 20 day moving average and has spent a couple of days below 1.2920 support. At this juncture I have to conclude that the…

  • Guesstimates on May 21, 2013

    21 May 2013 | 6:03 am
    June S&P E-mini Futures: Today’s range estimate is 1663-1673. I think the 1574-1587 zone defined by the 2000 and 2007 bull market tops is now support. The next upside target is 1775.  QQQ:  Next upside target is 76.50.    TNX (ten year note yield): Bond yields are going much higher as the market begins to anticipate stronger economic growth. The first upside yield target for the 10 year is 2.50%. Euro-US Dollar: The euro is trading below it 20 day moving average and has spent a couple of days below 1.2920 support. At this juncture I have to conclude that the…
 
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    The Art of Contrarian Trading

  • Bull

    16 May 2013 | 10:01 am
    Here is the latest cover of The Economist. It shows an imagage of a bull breaking through a wall, presumably the wall represented by the previous all time high points the Dow and the S&P had reached in 2007. The top chart is a daily chart of the S&P 500 and the horizontal green line is the 2007 top at 1576.According to Paul Montgomery's magazine cover theory this bullish cover is a definite negative for the stock market going forward. However, such covers on average preceded bull market tops by 4 months or so. This means that prices are likely to move still higher before anything…

  • things can always get worse - but will they?

    21 Mar 2013 | 12:19 pm
    Here is a daily bar chart of the euro priced in dollars.The EUR.USD is very much on the markets' mind now with the Cyprus banking system hanging by a thread. But after a downard adjustment to this news last Sunday night the euro has managed to hold its own as mini-waves of optimism and pessimism have washed across the markets.I think this steadiness in the euro in the face of bad news is interesting for three reasons. First, the market has dropped for nearly 7 weeks from its early February top. Second, this decline has brought it to a point slightly below the midpoint of the rally from the…

  • Conservative Contrarians Take Note

    6 Mar 2013 | 8:29 am
    The bottom two images are today's front pages from the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. Both note that yesterday the Dow closed at historical highs. I think the Tribune headline captures the spirit of this market pretty well. I think investors are happy to see the Dow at new highs but that skepticism about economic conditions and US economic prospects remains strong.The top image appears on page 1 of the Tribune's business section today. It suggests a little more optimism but in my judgement "Dow 20,000" projections are not very common right now.I don't think we are seeing a bullish…

  • Hyperinflation ahead? Not.

    22 Feb 2013 | 8:11 am
    In this post I explained why I thought that fears of imminent high inflation resulting from the Fed's quantitative easing policy were misplaced.Here is a post by Mark Perry which reports the latest estimate by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland of expected inflation. Their number is an average of 1.53% annual inflation over the next 10 years. This is what they come up with after examining both bond market data as well as survey data from investors and consumers. Of course expectations can always change. But this survey tells us that that there is no reason to think inflation will increase…

  • Buy ? Maybe not.

    18 Feb 2013 | 7:25 am
    Thanks to Paul Montgomery and Elliott Wave International for bringing my attention to the latest cover of a special, February 18 issue, of Maclean's magazine. Maclean's is the Canadian equivalent of Time magazine here in the US. But the cover story is all about the US stock market.The cover story quotes Ralph Acampora, a noted US market technician, as asserting that the current bull market is climbing a classic wall of worry. He further more observes that since the public has yet to return to stocks in any significant way (as measured, say, by mutual fund money net inflows) there is a lot of…
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    True Economics

  • 19/5/2013: Namawinelake closure

    19 May 2013 | 8:24 am
    I do not know the reasons behind the Namawinelake decision to stop operations, but the announcement that the blog will cease publishing new material starting from tomorrow was a shocker for me.I can attest from my own & others' experiences that those of us who run anything independent of the officialdom mouthpieces (regardless of political / ideological orientation or even the lack of one) have near-zero support (moral or citations- and links-wise) from our internal (not to be confused with international) media and all businesses.Those in our society, including the traditional media, who…

  • 17/5/2013: Ireland v Iceland 2013

    17 May 2013 | 1:23 pm
    Ireland vs Iceland macroeconomic comparatives in 15 simple charts that DofF wouldn't want you to see...All data is either IMF direct-sourced or based on IMF data. Click on the charts to see more detailed comments imbedded in them.Three charts on GDP comparatives:Investment:External trade and balance:Unemployment and Employment: Government Finances:

  • 17/5/2013: Good News Feel Chart That Is Real

    17 May 2013 | 8:52 am
    Nice chart via Markit:Lat time I checked, (yesterday) Irish CDS were trading at implied cumulative probability of default of 12.25% - wider than Iceland's 12.02% or South Africa's 10.58%.The mountain we climbed down from is impressive by all possible standards, but it is not remarkable, nor does if get much past the hardly 'untroubled' days of 2009-2010...

  • 17/5/2013: Welcome to Surreal Irish National Accounts

    17 May 2013 | 7:42 am
    A significant, but only because it is now 'official', confirmation that Ireland's GDP and GNP figures are vastly over-exaggerated by the distorting presence of some MNCs in Ireland has finally arrived to the pages of FT: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/eb114bda-be3f-11e2-9b27-00144feab7de.html#axzz2TYJudjwoAs one of those who said this time and again, starting with my work in the Open Republic Institute in 2001 and through today, I am grateful to Jamie Smyth for pointing this out.The ESRI, which - being tasked directly with doing research on Irish economy and being paid for doing such…

  • 16/5/2013: There are jobs & then there are...

    16 May 2013 | 11:45 am
    Off the start - there is nothing wrong with debt collection as business when it is properly delivered and regulated / supervised. And there is nothing wrong with debt collection agency growing its workforce.But, then again, there is nothing particularly laudable about this either.Unless, that is, you are an Irish Government Minister who cares none but for a headline grabbing opportunity.Capita - some background on the company is given here: http://www.rte.ie/news/2013/0516/450722-capita-jobs/…
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    Paper Economy - A US Real Estate Bubble Blog

  • Existing Home Sales Report: April 2013

    22 May 2013 | 8:06 am
    Today, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) released their Existing Home Sales Report for April showing an increase in sales with total home sales rising 0.6% since March and climbing 9.7% above the level seen in April 2012. Single family home sales also improved climbing 1.2% from March rising 9.0% above the level seen in April 2012 while the median selling price increased a notable 11% above the level seen a year earlier. Inventory of single family homes increased from March to 1.92 million units but still remained 11.9% below the level seen in April 2012 which, along with…

  • Reading Rates: MBA Application Survey – May 22 2013

    22 May 2013 | 6:22 am
    The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) publishes the results of a weekly applications survey that covers roughly 50 percent of all residential mortgage originations and tracks the average interest rate for 30 year and 15 year fixed rate mortgages as well as the volume of both purchase and refinance applications. The purchase application index has been highlighted as a particularly important data series as it very broadly captures the demand side of residential real estate for both new and existing home purchases. The latest data is showing that the average rate for a 30 year fixed rate…

  • The Chicago Fed National Activity Index: April 2013

    20 May 2013 | 9:11 am
    The latest release of the Chicago Federal Reserve National Activity Index (CFNAI) indicated worsening for the national economy with the index falling to a weak level of -0.53 from a level of -0.23 in March while the three month moving average declined to a level of -0.04. The CFNAI is a weighted average of 85 indicators of national economic activity collected into four overall categories of “production and income”, “employment, unemployment and income”, “personal consumption and housing” and “sales, orders and inventories”. The Chicago Fed regards a value of zero for the total…

  • Extended Unemployment: Initial, Continued and Extended Unemployment Claims May 16 2013

    16 May 2013 | 9:57 am
    Today’s jobless claims report showed a notable increase to initial unemployment claims and a slight decline to continued unemployment claims as initial claims trended well below the closely watched 400K level. Seasonally adjusted “initial” unemployment claims increased by 32,000 to 360,000 claims from 328,000 claims for the prior week while seasonally adjusted “continued” claims declined by 4,000 claims to 3.009 million resulting in an “insured” unemployment rate of 2.3%. Since the middle of 2008 though, two federal government sponsored “extended” unemployment benefit…

  • The Philly Fed Business Outlook Survey: May 2013

    16 May 2013 | 9:49 am
    The March release of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Business Outlook Survey (BOS) indicated a slight worsening of the regions manufacturing activity with the current activity index falling to a weak level of -5.2 while assessments the future activity improved to a level of 32.3. The following chart shows the current and future activity indexes both with their corresponding 3-month moving averages. The red line marks the threshold between contraction and expansion for these diffusion indexes.
 
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    The Economic Populist

  • New Home Sales Increase 2.3%, Prices Skyrocket for April 2013

    Robert Oak
    23 May 2013 | 1:41 pm
    April New Residential Single Family Home Sales increased 2.3% to 454,000 in annualized sales.   New Single Family Housing inventory is at a 4.1 month supply.  New single family home sales are now 29.0% above April 2012 levels, but this figure has a ±20.7% margin of error.   A year ago new home annualized sales were 352,000. Share

  • Employee Abuse Runs Rampant In America

    Robert Oak
    20 May 2013 | 2:36 pm
    Corporate culture, HR hound dogs who hunt the squeaky wheel, bullying, abuse and politics abound for working America today.  For those who still have a job, America has turned into a survivor game.  No longer are workers respected and treated as human beings.   Even those most educated and skilled are treated like pond scum Share

  • CPI Shows Inflation Dropped -0.4% on Volatile Gas Prices in April 2013

    Robert Oak
    16 May 2013 | 2:15 pm
    The April Consumer Price Index dropped -0.4% from March.  CPI measures inflation, or price increases.  The culprit is gas prices again, which plunged -8.1% for the month.  This is the biggest monthly decline in overall CPI since December 2008, when the economy was at risk of a deflationary spiral.  Take food and energy items out of the index and CPI actually rose 0.1% from March, so once again volatile retail gasoline prices are wreaking havoc in the overall consumer price index, as well as consumer's monthly budgets. Share

  • Initial Unemployment Claims Take a Hike Up Again

    Robert Oak
    16 May 2013 | 11:49 am
    The DOL reported people filing for initial unemployment insurance benefits in the week ending on May 11th, 2013 was 360,000, a 32,000 increase from the previous week of 328,000 and a six week high.  This is the wrong direction for weekly initial unemployment claims and shows, once again, as far as jobs are concerned, the recession never ended. Share

  • Student Financial Aid Goes To The Rich And The Poor Get Debt Instead

    Robert Oak
    9 May 2013 | 1:14 pm
    Did you know rich students get financial help from colleges while the poor ones get laden with debt instead?  Such is the conclusion of a new report, Demerit Aid, from the New America Foundation.  While Pell grants tallied $35 billion in 2012, universities are reducing their own financial aid based on income and instead, shifting those funds to the wealthy students. Share
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    Stock Trading To Go

  • STTG Market Recap May 23, 2013

    STTG Team
    23 May 2013 | 3:56 pm
    Thursday could be described as "dip buyers show up again".  After the outside day yesterday on the major indexes, global markets showed a lot of weakness overnight with Japan's Nikkei down over 7%.  U.S. markets opened up down about 1%, but within the first hour or so the dip buyers showed up to the scene.  Until they are punished repeatedly by the market for doing so, they will keep repeating the pattern that has been working for them all year.   In economic news Chinese flash purchasing managers data was weak, coming in at a contractionary level, while U.S. weekly unemployment claims…

  • STTG Market Recap May 22, 2013

    STTG Team
    22 May 2013 | 3:12 pm
    In Monday's recap we wrote, in regard to Bernanke's testimony Wednesday:The fact we are going into that testimony on such a huge run and at the top end of the channel probably means odds are he is going to say something that someone will interpret at somewhat hawkish and we might actually get some modest selling, but we'll see.Well we got some modest selling; in fact a bit more than modest.  Not versus Tuesday's close but certainly versus the highs enjoyed this morning.  The S&P 500 moved in a 35+ point range today as every comment from Bernanke (and then later in the day during the…

  • STTG Market Recap May 21, 2013

    STTG Team
    21 May 2013 | 3:32 pm
    It was a Tuesday in 2013.  Thus the market was up.  Simple enough.  We've seen a remarkable streak of 19 up Tuesdays in a row for the DJIA - essentially the entire year.  It's not the only record breaking streak - they are falling all over the place, we'll touch on one from SentimenTrader at the end of today's recap.  There was no real economic news flow today but two Federal Reserve speakers including the important NY Fed head William Dudley.  Both were dovish ahead of Ben Bernanke's testimony tomorrow on Capitol Hill.  That should be the main event of the week along with the FOMC…

  • STTG Market Recap May 20, 2013

    STTG Team
    20 May 2013 | 3:32 pm
    Welcome back to a new week as we enter the latter third of May.  Remember the old adage "Sell in May and go away?".   If only the world were so simple; you'd have missed a heck of a month by "going away".  A better strategy is reduce exposure/be cautious when technicals tell us to, and stay involved otherwise.  In that vein there have been a few periods of 2013 to be cautious at the least, but really no spot to be extremely bearish and/or be heavy short as we had in summers of previous years.... thus far.   Monday was a quiet day of consolidation after a huge run from mid April.  We…

  • Trading Signals for MetaTrader Review

    Blain
    18 May 2013 | 9:00 am
    MetaQuotes Software, the company behind popular platforms MetaTrader 4 and more recently MetaTrader 5, reached out earlier this month to have their new Trading Signals service reviewed. This is a paid review and my unbiased take on the product.MetaTrader PlatformMetaTrader is a standalone trading platform used primarily for trading Forex and also supports Futures, Stocks, and CFDs.The MetaTrader platform has everything one would expect: trading, charting, technical analysis, etc. The company's foundation began with MetaQuotes, and over the years has brought them to MetaTrader 5. Hundreds of…
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    WILLisms.com

  • Voting With Their Feet: Texas Cities Lead Nation In Population Growth.

    Will Franklin
    23 May 2013 | 11:40 am
    Trivia Tidbit of the Day: Part 972 -- Texas Cities Win- Texas just keeps winning. First, recognition from Investor's Business Daily: Texas outperformed every other state in the nation on jobs and growth over the past decade.... The rankings are based on state GDP growth, population shifts, and changes in non-farm payroll jobs between 2001 and 2011. Meanwhile, BizJournals ranked three Texas cities among the top five for economic performance in May (Barack Obama's Chicago, on the other hand, was 99th out of 102 major metros). And then there's the matter of people voting with their feet and…

  • Scranton Versus Austin.

    Will Franklin
    17 May 2013 | 4:34 pm
    Trivia Tidbit of the Day: Part 971 -- Jobs, GDP, Housing- SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't seen the final episode of The Office yet but plan on watching it at some point down the road, consider yourself warned. This post contains spoilers. NBC's last remaining hit show, The Office, aired its final episode last night. SPOILER ALERT The premise of the episode is that one year has passed, and the gang is all getting back together in Scranton for a retrospective panel about the PBS documentary they've been living for the past several years. Jim's start-up sports agency company, Athlead, renamed…

  • Dr. Steven Hotze's New Lawsuit Against Obamacare.

    Will Franklin
    7 May 2013 | 3:55 pm
    There is new life in the legal battle against Obamacare: In the above video which I filmed this morning, Dr. Steven F. Hotze, M.D. is surrounded by supportive conservatives from both chambers of the Texas legislature as he explains the basis of his lawsuit (be sure to watch the remarks from Andrew Schlafly, as well as the entire press conference with Q&A). The Texas Tribune explains why this lawsuit is a new front in the battle against Obamacare: The lawsuit presents two constitutional challenges: First, it argues that the ACA violates the rule that requires revenue-raising bills to begin the…

  • This Intentionally Engineered Air Traffic Control Traveshamockery.

    Will Franklin
    26 Apr 2013 | 8:18 am
    Trivia Tidbit of the Day: Part 970 -- Air Traffic Controllers Purposely Sandbagging- According to the Federal Aviation Administration, air traffic in the United States has decreased by nearly a quarter (23%) since the year 2000. Meanwhile, America actually has slightly more air traffic controllers than in the year 2000: So, traffic: way down. But more controllers. And then there's the budget situation, as described by Conn Carroll of the Washington Examiner: Here are the facts: President Obama’s 2013 FAA Budget Request asked for just $15.172 billion. But Congress gave them an extra $1.1…

  • Job Growth: City Cores Versus 'Burbs.

    Will Franklin
    19 Apr 2013 | 9:09 am
    Trivia Tidbit of the Day: Part 969 -- Job Growth In Exurbs More Than City Cores- Senator Vitter of Louisiana asked a question yesterday that deserves examination: Why do Democrats get 3 times as many Obama stimulus grants as Republicans? One key fact: Democratic districts, typically in city cores, have received $356,109,553 from Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER), a portion of the 2009 stimulus bill, compared to just $132,272,695 for Republican districts. So what's the deal? It's one of two things. 1) It's just blatant political machine cronyism and favoritism. 2)…
 
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    Political Calculations

  • Convergence

    23 May 2013 | 5:20 am
    Following our Seeking Alpha commenter rant today, it turns out that once again, we're right. Again. Here's the evidence, in which we take into account the Japanese Black Thursday stock market crash. Our chart below assumes that if the S&P 500 will indeed fall 18.30 points today, as the pre-market open stock price futures for the day currently indicate. Pay close attention to where the daily stock prices (dotted line) and the 20-day moving average (black line) converge: Why, it's almost as if we anticipated this would happen, absent some action by the Fed....

  • In Which We're Right. Again.

    23 May 2013 | 3:38 am
    We've had some fun over the past few days in forcing Seeking Alpha's editors to rewrite portions of our posts to remove our assessment of the intellectual quality of commentary provided by several of that site's more confused commenters to our posts so their feelings wouldn't be hurt, but today, we're just going to rub their faces in it. Consider this comment from one commenter, who was troubled by one particular passage in a recent article: You are correct, ironman: "this confuses some Seeking Alpha's commenters" In fact, I dare anyone to explain "We can observe this transition directly in…

  • Current Trends for the S&P 500

    22 May 2013 | 2:31 am
    We thought it might be fun to look at the recent trends in the S&P 500 at several different scales. Our first chart shows the current major trend for the S&P 500 index fits in with respect to the average monthly value of stock prices and trailing year dividends per share recorded since December 1991: Note that at this scale, we're tracking the average monthly index value for the S&P 500, which we find by taking the average of the daily closing values for the S&P 500 index in each calendar month, which allows us to tie into Robert Shiller's and the Cowles Commission's historic data for U.S.

  • Spring 2013 Snapshot of Expected Future S&P 500 Earnings

    21 May 2013 | 3:18 am
    Since we last looked at the S&P 500's expected trailing twelve-month earnings per share some three months ago, the future for the S&P 500's forecast earnings has become considerably brighter going forward. Which is good, because it also suggests that the U.S. economy went through a recessionary period in the second half of 2012, from which investors are now expecting a recovery. We can see that's the case in comparing our 15 February 2013 snapshot of the S&P 500's expected trailing year dividends per share for the fourth quarter of 2013 (2013-Q4, ending 31 December 2013) with our new snapshot…

  • The S&P 500 Enters a Post-Transition Period

    20 May 2013 | 2:59 am
    You have to admit - we were right. Last week was indeed a big week for the S&P 500! From Monday, 13 May 2013 to Friday, 17 May 2013, the S&P 500 rose by nearly 2%, or 32.35 points, from 1630.77 to a new record high of 1666.12. Over half the gain for the week came on Friday, 17 May 2013, as the S&P 500 rocketed up by 17 points. In doing that, the S&P 500 completed the transition it began on 1 May 2013, as investors shifted their forward-looking focus from the second quarter of 2013 to the first quarter of 2014 in setting their expectations for the sustainable portion of future earnings growth…
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    Calafia Beach Pundit

  • Thoughts on Tim Cook's testimony

    23 May 2013 | 2:43 pm
    I can't help but note the media's bias which is exemplified by a Bloomberg article that implies that Apple has avoided taxes by "shifting income ...  to offshore tax havens."Given that Apple has fully complied with all applicable laws, why should anyone presume that corporations have a duty or an obligation to maximize their tax liability? Corporations' duty is first and foremost to maximize shareholder profit. Without profit corporations cannot exist. If corporations fail to maximize their profit they are wasting scarce resources.Are financial journalists ignorant of the fact that the…

  • An early end to QE3 is not something to worry about

    23 May 2013 | 10:47 am
    Early last week I argued that the beginning of the end of QE3 was not scary, even though the Fed could start scaling back its asset purchases within a few months. Yesterday the Fed moved closer to doing just that, and it sent paroxysms of fear rippling through global equity markets. As I see it, this is simply an overreaction. The economy is not about to collapse just because the Fed buys fewer Treasuries and MBS. The Fed is going to be scaling back QE in response to an improvement in the economic outlook and there's nothing scary about that at all.Reading the bond market tea leaves shows…

  • Consumer loan delinquencies hit a new low

    22 May 2013 | 3:03 pm
    Delinquency rates on consumer loans and credit cards fell to a new all-time low in the first quarter of this year.Abstracting from student loans, which are growing at a (frightening) 20%+ annual rate and now make up some 20% of all consumer credit, banks have not aggressively expanded their consumer lending activities, as shown in the chart above. This presumably owes much to tighter lending standards and to consumers' desire to deleverage. But there has not been a wholesale curtailment of consumer lending that might explain declining delinquency rates. Falling delinquency rates thus are most…

  • What's bad for gold is good for stocks

    17 May 2013 | 9:01 am
    As the top chart shows, gold's brief recovery now looks more and more like a "dead cat bounce." Further weakness is likely in store, as the second chart suggests. As I mentioned last month, gold appears to be re-linking to commodities.This is a big deal, as the chart above suggests. Gold had been trouncing just about everything for 10 years or so, but now things are reversing. Equities—productive investment—are now in favor while gold—speculative investment—is out of favor.

  • Weak housing starts? Permits are a better indicator

    16 May 2013 | 11:34 am
    April housing starts were sharply lower than expected (853K vs. 970K), but building permits were much stronger than expected (1017K vs. 941K). The past behavior of these two series suggests that in cases like this where starts are this low relative to permits, they usually come back into line with permits in the subsequent month. Thus it's reasonable to expect that starts will bounce back next month, and that the boom in residential construction activity is ongoing.Not surprisingly, building permits and housing starts tend to track each other very closely, and it's reasonable to assume that…
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    Donald Marron

  • The World’s Most Traveled Bird is Still At It

    Donald
    22 May 2013 | 4:28 am
    B95, aka Moonbird, has again touched down in Delaware. After refueling on the eggs of spawning horseshoe crabs, he will head north to the Canadian arctic for at least his 21st breeding season. Remarkable for a four-ounce red knot whose normal lifespan is just four or five years and whose annual migration begins and ends way down in Tierra del Fuego. B95 has logged at least 340,000 miles over the years, probably more. That’s enough to go to the moon and halfway back, hence his nickname. He’s even got a biography.

  • Should Economists Pay More Attention to Politics?

    Donald
    8 May 2013 | 2:39 pm
    Economists often ignore politics when analyzing policy issues or view politics as a problem to overcome rather than as fundamental. When evaluating a carbon tax, for example, I try to tote up its potential environmental benefits, its hit to consumers and producers, what happens to the revenues, etc. I might also ponder what policy tweaks could facilitate a political coalition willing to enact such a tax. But I don’t typically worry about how a carbon tax would change the balance of power among coal, oil, nuclear, natural gas, and nuclear interests or between energy consumers…

  • Immigration, Dynamic Scoring, and CBO

    Donald
    3 May 2013 | 7:00 am
    Immigration policy poses an unusual challenge for the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. If Congress allows more people into the United States, our population, labor force, and economy will all get bigger. But CBO and JCT usually hold employment, gross domestic product (GDP), and other macroeconomic variables constant when making their budget estimates. In Beltway jargon, CBO and JCT don’t do macro-dynamic scoring. That non-dynamic approach works well for most legislation CBO and JCT consider, with occasional concerns when large tax or spending proposals might…

  • Inflation Remains Below Fed Target

    Donald
    29 Apr 2013 | 7:02 pm
    The Federal Reserve reportedly wants consumer inflation of about 2 percent per year, as measured by the personal consumption expenditures price index, affectionately known as the PCE. By that standard, Fed policy appears too tight, despite near-zero rates and ongoing QE: Over the past year, the headline PCE (dashed blue line) has increased only 1.0 percent, and the core PCE (orange line) is up only 1.1 percent. The core PCE strips out often-volatile food and energy prices not, as some wags would have it, because economists don’t drive, eat, or heat their homes, but because the resulting…

  • What’s the Mix of Spending and Revenue in the President’s Deficit Reduction Proposal?

    Donald
    12 Apr 2013 | 12:43 pm
    President Obama’s budget identifies a group of policies as a $1.8 trillion deficit reduction proposal. I found the budget presentation of this proposal somewhat confusing; in particular, it is difficult to see how much deficit reduction the president wants to do through spending cuts versus revenue increases. After some digging into the weeds, I pulled together the following summary to answer that question: The proposal would increase revenue by $750 billion over the next decade. Much media coverage has been incorrectly suggesting an increase of either $580 billion (revenue from limiting…
 
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    Supply and Demand (in that order)

  • Massachusetts Employees Will Keep Their Health Plans

    22 May 2013 | 6:52 am
    Copyright, The New York Times CompanyMassachusetts and a few neighboring states are likely to experience the Affordable Care Act a lot differently than the rest of America.Massachusetts is often held up as a window into America’s health insurance future, because it embarked on what came to be called the Romneycare reform six years ago. Like the Affordable Care Act provisions going into effect nationwide next year, Romneycare aimed to increase the fraction of the population with health insurance by imposing mandates on employers and employees and by subsidizing health insurance plans for…

  • Systematic Patterns of Employer Benefit Offerings after the ACA

    15 May 2013 | 7:22 am
    Copyright, The New York Times CompanyA number of industries can expect big changes in employee health insurance in the next year or two, while others will continue with business as usual.Beginning next year, states and the federal government intend to create opportunities for families to purchase health insurance, separate from their employers, through insurance “exchanges” in the states. Insurers and the federal government will heavily advertise the new plans. Most important, middle- and low-income families may qualify for valuable federal subsidies that will serve to reduce premiums and…

  • Substitution between Exchange Plans and Employer Plans

    12 May 2013 | 6:28 am
    I received this question:Do you believe the incentive effects related to the ACA will be more limited since: (i) they are more difficult to value/understand as compared to an unemployment check and (ii) the impact is less direct and comprehensive.My reply:You have hit on a key, and so far uncertain, economic force in the ACA. At one extreme, people may perceive the exchanges [the method of ACA subsidy delivery] to be something like Medicaid -- far inferior from the coverage they get from an employer. At the other extreme, they may view the coverage as quite similar, and then it becomes a…

  • Romneycare, Obamacare, and the Labor Market

    9 May 2013 | 7:41 am
    Conventional wisdom says that we can make a good guess about the post-2013 labor market impacts of Obamacare just by looking at the post-2006 performance of the Massachusetts labor market as it began its state-level health reform (Romneycare).If there were another country or region that had already tried Obamacare, we would learn a lot from the results. However, even though Obamacare and Romneycare are both forms of “health reform,” and both seek to reduce the number of people without health insurance, they are quite different in terms of the types and amount of labor-market incentives…

  • Modern Wage Economics: Too Subtle for the Blogosphere?

    8 May 2013 | 11:27 am
    Our economy uses a lot less labor than it did 10 years ago, and for good reason people are interested in the relative importance of supply and demand factors for explaining what happened to the quantity of labor.Naturally, a supply-demand decomposition exercise is enhanced by looking at both the quantity and price of labor, also known as the wage rate. That's why my book on the recession starts off with various indicators of wage rates and their dynamics (see chapter 2 beginning on page 9).Three or four decades of labor economics research are of great assistance in this exercise. That…
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    The Monkey Cage

  • Richard Arenberg comments on Wednesday’s Senate floor theatrics

    Sarah Binder
    23 May 2013 | 7:14 am
    Comments from Rich Arenberg interpreting yesterday’s Senate floor dust-up between Reid and McConnell over changing Senate rules: Maybe the confusing label “nuclear option” which has been given to potential procedural maneuvers in the Senate which could lead to a majority-only rewriting on the Senate rules is more apropos than we thought. During the Cold War, U.S. and Soviet intelligence each analyzed even the most subtle moves of the other side. If Soviet subs moved a few miles closer to the U.S. shores, the Air Force might move its long-range bombers outside their normal…

  • Why Ted Cruz Needs to Trust Republicans

    John Sides
    22 May 2013 | 5:50 pm
    The senior senator from Arizona urged this body to trust the Republicans. Let me be clear, I don’t trust the Republicans. I don’t trust the Democrats and I think a whole lot of Americans likewise don’t trust the Republicans or the Democrats because it is leadership in both parties that has got us into this mess. So said Ted Cruz today.  This is not the first time he’s run afoul not only of Democrats—Harry Reid called him a “schoolyard bully” a few weeks ago—but also of his fellow Republicans, conservative allies (e.g., the Wall Street…

  • The Sociology of Think-Tanks

    Henry Farrell
    22 May 2013 | 1:28 pm
    This article in The Nation is likely to cause some considerable embarrassment to the Center for American Progress (CAP). Though the think tank didn’t disclose it, First Solar belonged to CAP’s Business Alliance, a secret group of corporate donors, according to internal lists obtained by The Nation. Meanwhile, José Villarreal—a consultant at the power-
house law and lobbying firm Akin Gump, who “provides strategic counseling on a range of legal and policy issues” for 
corporations—was on First Solar’s board until April 2012 while also sitting…

  • Special Prosecutors: Be Careful What You Wish For

    Andrew Rudalevige
    22 May 2013 | 11:48 am
    There have been various calls in recent days for the appointment of an independent counsel to explore and expunge the IRS’s selective investigation of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status after 2009. From the right, Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal claims, for instance,that “we are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate.” If you can get past this cheap hyperbole (Ms. Noonan herself worked in a White House marked by a worse scandal, Iran-contra, and in 1998 she thought President Clinton deserved impeachment), her point is worth noting:…

  • Final Free E-Chapter of The Gamble Is Available

    John Sides
    22 May 2013 | 7:35 am
    Lynn Vavreck and I are pleased to announce the next e-chapter of our book on the 2012 presidential election, The Gamble.  The chapter, “High Rollers,” is here (with a pdf link here) and on Amazon. This chapter is the first of three chapters on the general election campaign.  It deals with the summer campaign, including the continuing importance of fundamentals like the economy and party identification, the candidates’ messaging strategies, Obama’s early advertising blitz, the attacks on and news coverage of Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, various…
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    Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

  • Validation of Software for Bayesian Models Using Posterior Quantiles

    Andrew
    23 May 2013 | 6:41 am
    Every once in awhile I get a question that I can directly answer from my published research. When that happens it makes me so happy. Here’s an example. Patrick Lam wrote, Suppose one develops a Bayesian model to estimate a parameter theta. Now suppose one wants to evaluate the model via simulation by generating fake data where you know the value of theta and see how well you recover theta with your model, assuming that you use the posterior mean as the estimate. The traditional frequentist way of evaluating it might be to generate many datasets and see how well your estimator performs…

  • To Throw Away Data: Plagiarism as a Statistical Crime

    Andrew
    22 May 2013 | 6:27 am
    I’ve been blogging a lot lately about plagiarism (sorry, Bob!), and one thing that’s been bugging me is, why does it bother me so much. Part of the story is simple: much of my reputation comes from the words I write, so I bristle at any attempt to devalue words. I feel the same way about plagiarism that a rich person would feel about counterfeiting: Don’t debase my currency! But it’s more than that. After discussing this a bit with Thomas Basbøll, I realized that I’m bothered by the way that plagiarism interferes with the transmission of information: Much has…

  • Recently in the sister blog

    Andrew
    21 May 2013 | 6:53 am
    The end of Michelle Rhee. The relevance of statisticians to researchers in different fields of social science. Regression discontinuity. Free expression vs. not wanting to make anyone personally uncomfortable. Political coalitions are diverse (and there’s no use pretending otherwise). According to David Brooks, staying out of jail is a conservative value. I’ve heard of the IRB, but this is ridiculous. This will make Richard Florida very happy. I don’t know whether to call it communism or crony capitalism . . .. Concepts and folk theories. This should keep youall busy for awhile. The…

  • Evaluating Columbia University’s Frontiers of Science course

    Andrew
    20 May 2013 | 6:18 am
    Frontiers of Science is a course offered as part of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum. The course is controversial, with some people praising its overview of several areas of science, and others feeling that a more traditional set of introductory science courses would do the job better. Last month, the faculty in charge of the course wrote the following public letter: The United States is in the midst of a debate over the value of a traditional college education. Why enroll in a place like Columbia College when you can obtain an undergraduate degree for $10,000 or learn everything…

  • What happened that the journal Psychological Science published a paper with no identifiable strengths?

    Andrew
    20 May 2013 | 6:04 am
    The other day we discussed that paper on ovulation and voting (you may recall that the authors reported a scattered bunch of comparisons, significance tests, and p-values, and I recommended that they would’ve done better to simply report complete summaries of their data, so that readers could see the comparisons of interest in full context), and I was thinking a bit more about why I was so bothered that it was published in Psychological Science, which I’d thought of as a serious research journal. My concern isn’t just that that the paper is bad—after all, lots of bad…
 
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    Capital Chronicle

  • "Cyborg Finance" paper

    5 May 2013 | 10:00 am
    Little pre-abstract primer for this paper: Detective Del Spooner: Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece? Sonny: Can you? AbstractA sea change is happening in finance. Machines appear to be on the rise and humans on the decline. Human endeavors have become unmanned endeavors. Human thought and human deliberation have been replaced by computerized analysis and mathematical models. Technological advances have made finance faster, larger, more…

  • Biggest arb ever recorded ends 20 May...

    2 May 2013 | 6:35 am
    Fascinating paper from Robert Treue III’s Barnegat Fund documenting what has been called in the popular press the largest arbitrage ever recorded. In the financial upheaval around the opening of this trade in late 2008 the fund was down 37%. But he had the room to absorb the vagaries of timing and come good.A pic of the arb is below and some interesting background on Mr. Treue, in his own words, is here.Most interesting, though, is that Barnegat do exactly what Long Term Capital Management did. Only with less leverage/more collateral. (HT: ArbMaker)

  • Thank heavens for auditor research

    7 Jan 2013 | 10:32 am
    Original here.Adulterated below.

  • Congressional reports & Chinese tech companies...

    22 Oct 2012 | 8:45 am
    Background here and here.

  • From Merrill Lynch stock analyst to financial astrologer

    7 Oct 2012 | 5:25 am
    Brilliant. Not sure what it says about Merrill Lynch's training methods though.Favourite quote from the 'Transcript' tab (and it was a hard decision):"Knight Capital did not take our advice to downplay new purchases or trying new things during the apparent retrograde motion of Mercury."
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    TheMoneyIllusion

  • Money isn’t “easy”– A rant

    ssumner
    18 May 2013 | 8:43 am
    I am traveling today, so only have time to complain about some themes I keep coming across when reading the press and speaking to people out in the real world.  No links. 1.  There is no reason at all for the ECB to look around for transmission mechanisms to boost the eurozone economy.  Europe is in recession because the ECB WANTS IT TO BE IN RECESSION.  Yes, the ECB doesn’t know that it wants a recession, but the NGDP growth it is producing will inevitably produce a recession in the eurozone.  OK, they aren’t even targeting NGDP, but the highly flawed CPI including oil and…

  • A Japanese recovery?

    ssumner
    16 May 2013 | 9:25 am
    Japan’s new GDP numbers look a bit puzzling: Japan’s economy expanded the most in a year last quarter as consumer spending and export gains outweighed the weakest business investment since the wake of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Gross domestic product rose an annualized 3.5 percent, a Cabinet Office release showed in Tokyo. Private consumption, making up 60 percent of GDP, contributed 2.3 percentage points to the jump. The Bank of Japan may upgrade its assessment of the economy after a May 22 policy meeting, according to people familiar with the central bank’s…

  • A NGDP targeting counterfactual

    ssumner
    11 May 2013 | 4:13 am
    A commenter asked me to do a post on what would have happened if NGDP targeting had been put into effect in mid-2008. The immediate effect would have been a boom in asset prices, and most likely Lehman would not have failed. The big financial crisis of October 2008 would not have happened. In other words, macroeconomic conditions in 2009 would have played out much like the consensus of economists expected in mid-2008—nothing special. But let’s say I’m wrong, what then? 1.  A sharp drop in demand for credit due to the real estate crash. Note that “demand” is a…

  • Clive Crook on DeLong and Krugman

    ssumner
    10 May 2013 | 2:19 pm
    Here’s Clive Crook: The substance of DeLong’s complaint about my column and post appears to be that they lack supporting documentation. I asserted (thinking it self-evident) that many Republicans are thoughtful and public-spirited. DeLong is incredulous and finds it revealing that I failed to give examples. I also accused Krugman of letting partisan politics taint his analysis and said he cared as much about undoing the Bush tax cuts as about expanding and extending the fiscal stimulus. At this, DeLong is aghast. He demands to see my evidence. Will this do? From Krugman’s…

  • 6 months in Japan

    ssumner
    10 May 2013 | 5:04 am
    Last November 15th I did a post after day one the Great Japanese Bull Market.  Here are a few excerpts: Each day I check out the major stock markets.  This morning I saw that Hong Kong and Singapore were down over 1%.  Britain, Germany and France were also down.  But the Japanese market, which tends to move with the other Asian markets, was up by 1.90%.  That’s a surprisingly large divergence.  Is there any news?  It turns out that there is news, but only if you don’t believe in “liquidity traps.”  Travis Allison sent me the following: The yen slumped to the lowest in more…
 
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    Scott Lincicome

  • Welcome to the Whimsy-conomy, Energy Trade Edition

    22 May 2013 | 4:45 pm
    This entry was cross-posted on the Cato Institute's blog, Cato at Liberty. The AP reports some bad news for anyone seeking a little security and predictability in the US and global energy markets: Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said Tuesday he will delay final decisions on about 20 applications to export liquefied natural gas until he reviews studies by the Energy Department and others on what impact the exports would have on domestic natural gas supplies and prices. Moniz, who was sworn in Tuesday as the nation’s new energy chief, said he promised during his confirmation hearing that he…

  • Unilateral Import Liberalization Is Helpful, Egalitarian and - Yes - Politically Possible

    29 Apr 2013 | 4:56 pm
    The Heritage Foundation's Bryan Riley has a great new study out today arguing in favor of the unilateral elimination of all - yes, all - US barriers to imports.  Here's the summary: Congress routinely makes targeted, short-term tariff cuts through “miscellaneous tariff bills.” While conventional wisdom is that unilateral tariff cuts are politically impossible, these bills show that it is possible to reduce tariffs. Proponents of such tariff cuts argue that the cuts support U.S. jobs; critics argue that the economic value of miscellaneous cuts is modest, and that the process is open…

  • So USDA Is Pondering a "Sugar-for-Ethanol" Program. No, Really.

    13 Apr 2013 | 6:31 am
    From earlier this week comes news of what could quite possibly be the most cronytastic US government program of all time: The White House will decide in coming weeks whether to attempt to blunt low prices in the U.S. sugar market by buying hundreds of thousands of tons of surplus sugar and selling it at a loss to ethanol makers. If approved, it would be the first time the sugar-for-ethanol program, created in 2008 and known as the Feedstock Flexibility Program, has been put into operation.... Large crops in the United States and Mexico have pushed New York futures prices below the trigger…

  • Tackling Regulatory Protectionism, Finally

    9 Apr 2013 | 4:55 pm
    I've occasionally peered into the abyss that is the barriers to international trade imposed by the US regulatory regime, but I've never been courageous enough to tackle the very important - yet mind-numbingly difficult - task of rigorously documenting these non-tariff barriers and their deleterious effects on the US economy.  Fortunately, Cato's Sallie James and Bill Watson have proven up to the task with a brand new paper: Despite the impressive success of trade liberalization, domestic industries continue to find ways to use the power of government to protect themselves from foreign…

  • Need Unnecessary

    28 Mar 2013 | 4:44 pm
    This just in from the GAO on US wind energy subsidies (emphasis mine): GAO identified 82 federal wind-related initiatives, with a variety of key characteristics, implemented by nine agencies in fiscal year 2011. Five agencies--the Departments of Energy (DOE), the Interior, Agriculture (USDA), Commerce, and the Treasury--collectively implemented 73 of the initiatives. The 82 initiatives incurred about $2.9 billion in wind-related obligations and provided estimated wind-related tax subsidies totaling at least $1.1 billion in fiscal year 2011, although complete data on wind-related tax…
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    Jesse's Café Américain

  • Monetary Rapture: The Incredible Disappearing Gold Inventories - Ocean Receding

    23 May 2013 | 6:25 pm
    Gold is flowing from weaker hands to stronger hands, from speculators to central banks and wealthy investors, the multitudes in China and India, and in general from West to East. Nick Laird of Sharelynx.com does some incredible work tracking and charting almost every aspect of the gold and silver markets. His site is well worth visiting. I have included some comments from Nick below that

  • Jim Rickards and Max Keiser On Currency Wars and the Late Great Depression

    23 May 2013 | 5:30 pm
    I think you will find this to be thought provoking, even though you may not agree with all which they say. Keep in mind that in the US currently there is a record disparity between the haves and the 'have enough to just get by.'  So when one talks about economic states and statistics, and they are naturally referring to the familiar averages and norms, in fact there may be much fewer

  • Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts

    23 May 2013 | 1:18 pm
    Intraday commentary on the rehypothecation Ponzi scheme in the metals here.   Tomorrow will be a quiet trading day in the afternoon as the US heads into a three day weekend. Have a pleasant evening.

  • SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Buy the Dip, Skip

    23 May 2013 | 1:11 pm
    World markets sold off hard overnight, but the irrepressible center of the empire managed to rally off the stock lows today on 'better than expected new home sales, and other economic indicators in line. VIX ticked up a bit, but all is well in a market marked to fantasy. The US has a three day weekend, so tomorrow is expected to be quiet, particularly in the afternoon when the adults head out

  • Net Asset Value Premiums of Certain Precious Metal Trusts and Funds - Rehypothecation Ponzi

    23 May 2013 | 7:56 am
    Thin premiums remain the order of the day for the gold and silver holding trusts and funds. Citi analyst Tom Fitzpatrick sees gold appreciating $2,000+ from here.  I think quite a bit of that sort of move could happen more quickly than most might imagine. I think quite a bit of this recent gold action is taking place on the public stage, but is being driven by private talks amongst the
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    Stumbling and Mumbling

  • On terrorist probabilities

    chris dillow
    23 May 2013 | 6:11 am
    Why aren't the Scots doing more to combat their culture of violence? Why aren't its community leaders doing more to rein in their violent minority? Don't we need tougher laws to protect us from the threat posed by men of Scottish appearance? You might think I've lost my mind. From a statistical point of view, though, I haven't. According to table 1.18 of this pdf, there were 89 Muslims in prison for terrorist offences in March 2012 . As there are 2.7 million Muslims, this is 33 per million. By contrast, there were at the latest count 2382 people imprisoned in Scotland for…

  • Superstars' baleful effects

    chris dillow
    22 May 2013 | 6:11 am
    Do we over-rate the importance of individual talents to organizational performance? I ask because of this finding by Sander Hoogendoorn: Team performance exhibits an inverse u-shaped relationship with ability dispersion. This comes from a study of MBA students' collaborations on business projects. But it is consistent with a finding from baseball, that teams with middling levels of ability dispersion do better than those with low or high dispersion. It's easy to hypothesise why this might be so. Where's there's middling levels of ability dispersion, less able team members can…

  • Why pre-tax inequality matters

    chris dillow
    21 May 2013 | 6:48 am
    Does pre-tax inequality matter? I ask because of a dispute between Aditya and Tim. Aditya says that inequality is back at 1920s levels - which is true if we consider the share of the richest 1% - to which Tim replies that the relevant metric is inequality after taxes and welfare benefits: What we really want to do is measure the distribution after we’ve changed it. For only after we’ve checked how much we have changed it can we decide whether we want to change it some more. However, I suspect that pre-redistribution inequality does matter. For one thing, market rewards are linked to the…

  • "Swivel-eyed loons"

    chris dillow
    19 May 2013 | 2:27 am
    In the row over the "mad, swivel-eyed loons" remarks, something is being missed - that, from an economists' perspective, we'd expect political activists to be disproportionately mad. By "mad" I do not mean the content of activists' beliefs, but rather the intensity with which they are held; I'm thinking here of fanaticism rather than extremism. I don't think opposition to EU membership or to gay marriage are mad. What is mad is attaching great importance to such views. As Adam Smith said, "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation." We can…

  • Adam Smith on immigration

    chris dillow
    16 May 2013 | 6:24 am
    UKIP claims that its tax policies are derived from Adam Smith. But what would the great man make of its anti-immigration policies? I suspect the answer is: not much. Now, immigration was not much of an issue in Smith's time so he said little about it directly. But he did point out that some forms of migration, such as the settlement of new colonies, greatly increased prosperity. And his argument that import duties encouraged smuggling has an obvious parallel with how immigration controls encourage people traficking.  smuggling. But I'm thinking more of a passage in The Theory of…
 
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    David Smith's EconomicsUK.com

  • GDP confirmed at 0.3% - detail disappoints

    David Smith
    23 May 2013 | 3:00 am
    Gross domestic product rose by 0.3% in the first quarter, in line with the preliminary estimate, but the economy is still in need of some serious rebalancing. Both net exports and investment subtracted from GDP by 0.1 points in the...

  • Something for everybody in the IMF

    David Smith
    22 May 2013 | 7:30 am
    If diplomacy is the art of not causing offence, the IMF's annual Article IV assessment of the UK economy is a master-class in diplomacy. It allows the government to say it is already doing the things the IMF recommends and...

  • Inflation falls across the board

    David Smith
    21 May 2013 | 3:00 am
    Inflation has been remarkably steady at 2.7% or 2.8% in recent months so the drop in April to 2.4% was a surprise, and a very welcome one. Lower petrol prices and air fares contributed most to the fall, which reduced...

  • The governor's eyebrows point to an upturn

    David Smith
    19 May 2013 | 2:00 am
    My regular column is available to subscribers on www.thesundaytimes.co.uk This is an excerpt. The CBI, the employers’ organisation, says Britain’s economy is “moving from flat to growth”. The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says its latest leading...

  • King's last bow: a more upbeat forecast

    David Smith
    15 May 2013 | 5:00 am
    Today was unusual in two respects. The first was that it was Sir Mervyn King's last inflation report press conference, after more than 80, ahead of his retirement next month. The second was that the Bank's new forecast is slightly...
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    Top Gun Financial Planning

  • How To Play A Stock Market Bubble

    Greg Feirman
    12 May 2013 | 6:50 am
    NOTE: Every week or two I wrote a Client Note for my clients. I post the notes to my blog but with a time delay usually between 1 day and 1 week. To receive the Client Notes at the same time as my clients, sign up in the box in the right hand corner of the website. ***** In the last few weeks, I have become more and more persuaded that we are entering the bubble phase of the current bull market.  Investing in such an environment is tricky.  The opportunities for windfall profits are high – as are the risks of catastrophic losses. In investing, it is crucial to distinguish between the…

  • Some Perspective On Gold

    Greg Feirman
    14 Apr 2013 | 6:08 am
    NOTE: Every week or two I wrote a Client Note for my clients. I post the notes to my blog but with a time delay usually between 1 day and 1 week. To receive the Client Notes at the same time as my clients, sign up in the box in the right hand corner of the website. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. - Rudyard Kipling “If” The hot topic of the moment – along with the S&P reaching new all time highs (see “The Road To 1600″, April 10) – is the collapse of the gold market. In general, most investors have little interest in gold.

  • The Road To 1600

    Greg Feirman
    11 Apr 2013 | 8:23 am
    NOTE: Every week or two I wrote a Client Note for my clients. I post the notes to my blog but with a time delay usually between 1 day and 1 week. To receive the Client Notes at the same time as my clients, sign up in the box in the right hand corner of the website. I have to admit it: I never thought we’d get here. New all-time highs on the S&P 500. Over the last four years, again and again I’ve learned the hard way the relentlessness of this bull market. I am humbled. The last time I felt this way was three years ago when I wrote a Client Note titled “I Was Wrong”…

  • Market Internals: A Look Beneath The Surface

    Greg Feirman
    3 Apr 2013 | 5:17 am
    NOTE: Every week or two I wrote a Client Note for my clients. I post the notes to my blog but with a time delay usually between 1 day and 1 week. To receive the Client Notes at the same time as my clients, sign up in the box in the right hand corner of the website. While the overall S&P closed at a new record Tuesday (1570), the small cap Russell 2000 was down 0.5% and is down 1.8% the first two days of April. As a result, overall breadth on Tuesday was quite weak. Less than 50% of NYSE traded securities were positive on the day and advancing volume not much above 40%. What that means is…

  • A Preview of 1st Quarter Earnings

    Greg Feirman
    25 Mar 2013 | 6:21 am
    NOTE: Every week or two I wrote a Client Note for my clients. I post the notes to my blog but with a time delay usually between 1 day and 1 week. To receive the Client Notes at the same time as my clients, sign up in the box in the right hand corner of the website. There was a lot going on last week. While everyone was focused on the drama in Cyprus, a number of bellwether companies whose quarters ended in February reported earnings. Developments in Cyprus will likely dominate the headlines and market action this week. However, attention will soon turn to 1st quarter earnings. Studying these…
 
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    Project Syndicate RSS-Feed

  • Britain, Ireland, and Europe

    David Miliband
    23 May 2013 | 1:13 pm
    British Prime Minister David Cameron is increasingly beholden to Conservative backbenchers who want to pull the UK out of the EU. On May 22, former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband delivered the Irish Business and Employers Confederation Annual Lecture, in which he defended continued EU membership.

  • Misreading the Global Economy

    Ashoka Mody
    23 May 2013 | 7:50 am
    Over the last three years, the IMF's economic forecasts have repeatedly proved to be overly optimistic. The problem is rooted in a misdiagnosis of the global economy's problems, including the impact of the eurozone crisis and slowing GDP growth in emerging economies.

  • Europe’s Clash of Generations

    Gene Frieda
    23 May 2013 | 7:20 am
    EU leaders are under pressure from a new generation of voters, for whom the original purpose of European integration – preventing war – holds little significance today. If EU leaders do not respond effectively, emerging political parties will seek to restore the protective national barriers that their predecessors demolished.

  • The Human City

    Parag Khanna
    23 May 2013 | 6:50 am
    The world is undergoing rapid urbanization, with the share of the population living in cities set to reach 60% by 2030. International institutions, governments, NGOs, and others must work together to make cities efficient, livable, and sustainable, using technology and public policy to support citizens’ welfare and aspirations.

  • Europe’s Lost Keynesians

    Kenneth Rogoff
    23 May 2013 | 5:00 am
    There is no magic Keynesian bullet for the eurozone’s woes, despite what many commentators and much of the public seem to believe. The eurozone’s difficulties stem from European financial and monetary integration having gotten too far ahead of actual political, fiscal, and banking union – not exactly a problem that Keynes tried to address.
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    Benzinga Feeds

  • Market Wrap for Thursday, May 23: Wall Street Shrugs Off Global Slump

    Scott Rubin
    23 May 2013 | 1:30 pm
    Thursday's trading session may have been the most glaring example of just how powerful the bull market in U.S. stocks is right now. Even though all of the major averages closed slightly lower on the day, the U.S. market was able to shrug off a global rout in stock prices that began with a 7.3 percent crash in the Nikkei.

  • Housing Market Recovering, New Home Sales Up 2.3 Percent in April

    Ari Crane
    23 May 2013 | 12:53 pm
    The U.S housing market continues to swing towards a recovery as positive data on new home sales were released earlier today. According to Reuters, the sale of new single family homes rose 2.3 percent in April.

  • Mid-Afternoon Market Update: Markets Turn Upwards, Ply Gem Rises

    Jake L'Ecuyer
    23 May 2013 | 12:34 pm
    Toward the end of trading Thursday, the Dow traded up 0.13 percent to 15,327.52, while the NASDAQ fell 0.12 percent to 3,459.98. The S&P was also down, declining 0.24 percent to 1,651.88.

  • Mid-Day Market Update: Stocks Pare Losses, Hewlett-Packard Surges On Upbeat Earnings

    Jake L'Ecuyer
    23 May 2013 | 9:44 am
    Midway through trading Thursday, the Dow traded down 0.04 percent to 15,301.07, while the NASDAQ fell 0.15 percent to 3,457.98. The S&P was also down, declining 0.33 percent to 1,649.94.

  • New Home Sales Increase Amid Tight Inventories

    Gene Balas
    23 May 2013 | 8:01 am
    Sales of new single-family homes in April 2013 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 454,000, according to estimates released jointly Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This is 2.3 percent above the revised March rate of 444,000 and is 29 percent above the April 2012 estimate of 352,000.
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    OilPrice.com Daily News Update

  • US Natural Gas Exports, Slowly but Surely

    23 May 2013 | 3:16 pm
    While the hints over the past weeks have favored expanded US natural gas exports, the confirmation of Energy Security Ernest Moniz has delayed a final decision on the process, with 19 export applications on hold for more in-depth review. This has somewhat dampened the momentum following the Department of Energy’s (DOE) decision last Friday to conditionally approve a Texas LNG project. Then on Tuesday, Moniz was officially sworn in and called for a further review of the proposals before making any final decisions. The review he’s waiting…Read more...

  • Doubt Deepens Further Over Polish Shale Gas

    23 May 2013 | 3:08 pm
    Energy companies flocked to Poland after a 2011 US Department of Energy report estimated its shale gas reserves as perhaps the largest in Europe, 22.5 trillion cubic meters, of which nearly a quarter would be ready for immediate extraction. Most of the latter quantity, about two-thirds, was located in the Baltic Sea Basin, another quarter in the Lublin basin, and the remainder in Podlasie Voivodeship. However, these figures have turned out to be far too optimistic, in part because the geological formations are more complicated and with deeper rock…Read more...

  • What 9 Company Hedge Books Are Revealing about the Natural Gas Market

    23 May 2013 | 3:06 pm
    You can see it clear as day in their hedging strategies...Natural gas producers are increasingly bearish on prices for their sector. The numbers tell the tale.  Canadian gas producers surveyed for the Oil and Gas Investments Bulletin hedged AECO-sold production at $5.27 in 2011. Hedge prices have dropped steadily for gas sold since—to $4.27 in 2012, and to $3.29 for currently-hedged production in 2013.Why the falling hedge price?  Because it made sense – Natural gas prices fell steadily from the beginning of 2010 through to…Read more...

  • Is the Solar Energy Bubble Finally Bursting?

    23 May 2013 | 3:02 pm
    My recent post about the costs of Germany’s policy of subsidizing solar energy inspired predictable attacks by true believers in a future powered by solar energy. I was criticized for citing the German magazine Spiegel, a center-right popular magazine. Well, I cited Spiegel for certain facts, and if you don’t believe Spiegel, perhaps you will believe the reputable environmentalist writer Mark Lynas, whose sources are German government statistics. (And if you think Lynas is discredited because he supports GMOs and nuclear energy, even…Read more...

  • Terracide and the Terrarists - Destroying the Planet for Record Profits

    23 May 2013 | 2:59 pm
    Published with premission by TomDispatchWe have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide.  And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide.  But we don’t have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity had known it until, historically speaking, late last night.  A possibility might be “terracide” from the Latin word for earth.  It has the right ring, given its similarity to the commonplace danger word…Read more...
 
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    zentrader.ca

  • Special Update on EUR/USD

    jeff pierce
    22 May 2013 | 1:23 pm
    By ForexAlerts.ca The following is a recap of our call on the EUR/USD pair and how we recommended subscribers to trade. This morning the EUR/USD traded up past our range of 1.29942 (seen below) which is were we felt would be a solid short entry.  We closed that trade via twitter this morning at 9:30am for a PL: +141 pips profit Yesterday’s Commentary: EUR/USD is trading within a 1.27201 - 1.29942 range. We are on the sidelines. The outlook is bearish, but the pair needs to have some kind of a rally for us to get short. We want to establish a short position anywhere between…

  • Put/Call Reaching Complacent Levels

    Jeff Pierce
    21 May 2013 | 9:26 pm
    By Jeff Pierce     Related Posts: Correction: Sideways Or Pullback? Three Breakouts To Watch Pause Would Do Markets Good

  • Financial Astrology: Pluto Square Uranus

    Jeff Pierce
    21 May 2013 | 11:07 am
    The following is from Sunday premium report published on May 19th by Astrology Traders. Another potential power shift could come for the Fed: Bernanke is meeting with Congress next week.  There could be negotiations and secret deals that are very likely centered on the unfinished business of the “Grand Bargain.” Recent maneuvers by Congress to block the administrations CFPB director Richard Cordray in his ability to function as director, may be circumventing the administration and Fed’s monetary policies.  While this is taking place the Chairman is under the influence of…

  • Space Oddity 2013

    Jeff Pierce
    20 May 2013 | 10:28 am
    By Jeff Pierce Chris Hadfield video onboard ISS with Larrivée Guitar. This is pretty amazing. Canadian astronaut on a recent 5 month stint decided to create a video during his downtime… Apparently Youtube has disabled the embedding feature which is pretty lame in my opinion. I’d normally just delete this post at this time, but this is worth watching, even if you have to go to their site to do it.     Related Posts: Pause Would Do Markets Good Pyramid of Summerhill Japan Looking Very Bubbly (In A Good Way)

  • Gold Is Due For A Bounce

    Jeff Pierce
    19 May 2013 | 7:19 pm
    By Poly     The waterfall decline I’ve been expecting has essentially now been satisfied (Red line).  The Cycle has run into the 25 day range and is more than ready to print a Daily Cycle Low.  Technically gold is oversold to the level where DCL’s have comfortably formed.  From this point forward it should be argued that a Swing Low would hold a very high chance of confirming a DCL. But my overriding problem is with the shape and feel of this decline.  It’s a waterfall alright, but it’s a controlled one, and that is not normal.  This 7 straight day losing stretch has…
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    MartinKronicle

  • Being at One with the Universe

    Michael Martin
    30 Apr 2013 | 11:48 pm
    What to do when your Trading System is not the problem You think you have great entries and exits, and you have position sizes that you’re comfortable with. Yet when you systematize them, the hypothetical results are not critical to the extent that you can use them to manage risk — or raise any capital to trade. So you go back into the dashboard of your simulator and you start the tweak the living daylights out of your entries. That doesn’t work. You tweak your exits. That does’t work either. You test smaller positions. That doesn’t work. You begin to add…

  • The Better Part of Valor — and Your Trading System — is Discretion

    Michael Martin
    23 Apr 2013 | 11:52 pm
    There are many misconceptions about creating a mechanized trading system. Some feel that mechanized systems are better than discretionary systems as if they give a trader an edge. I think this may be true for those traders just starting out. However, I personally know many discretionary traders that have done just fine without systems. The key is to do what’s best for you. Allocators will give money to traders who can perform. Lastly, discretionary trading is a form of a system unto itself. More on this in another post. I tend to see those traders who wish to become CTAs going the…

  • Krugman a “Political Hack,” Making Things Up As He Goes

    Michael Martin
    11 Feb 2013 | 2:13 pm
    by Victor Sperandeo “Economics is the science of means to be applied for the attainment of ends chosen.” The above quote is from Ludwig Von Mises, a founder of the Austrian School of Economics, a school of thought which mirrors my beliefs. It implies that “how” you solve problems (what political philosophy is to be used) is an (idealogical) choice, as well as an economic one, and “how you attain a goal,” demonstrates what your political beliefs are. Politics is a branch of philosophy of “how people in society should live.” This is achieved…

  • Why Most People Fail at Trading

    Michael Martin
    11 Jan 2013 | 12:03 am
    Similar Posts: Jon Najarian at Milken on Option Trading & Risk Management How Trading Coffee Option Spreads Can Help You Sleep At Night Sanctions On Iran Will Fail Everyone’s An Expert On Election Day: Smart People Hate Being Wrong – Would Rather Lose Money 80-90% Of Traders Fail, But Here Is Some Useful Insight

  • The Banjomaster

    Michael Martin
    15 Dec 2012 | 10:41 pm
    One cold winter morning a young man flies 1,377 miles on a plane to visit his friend and mentor. He knocks on the Banjomaster’s door. The Banjomaster answers with a long-necked banjo in his hand. “Yes?” “I want to learn about the Banjo.” “Very well then, come in out of the cold.” They sit at the kitchen table eating soft-boiled eggs and blueberry sausages. The Banjomaster hands the young man an instrument and begins to talk about the fundamentals of firewood. After a few minutes, the young man interrupts. “Excuse me, I am here to learn about the…
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    NEW ECONOMY

  • Worker-Owned Window Factory Opens for Business

    Kristin Hugo
    9 May 2013 | 4:30 pm
    When 250 workers were laid off by what was then called Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, they arranged a sit-in to protest violations against their union agreements. The second time it happened, they decided to purchase the now-bankrupt company and operate it themselves. The new company is a worker-owned co-operative called New Era Windows, which opens for business today. Interested? How Workers Laid Off from a Chicago Factory Took It Over ThemselvesWhen their boss tried to fire them, the workers of Republic Windows and Doors occupied the factory. Now they own it as a cooperative.

  • Why the TransPacific Partnership is a Scary Big (Trade) Deal

    Kristen Beifus
    8 May 2013 | 12:25 pm
    Photo courtesy of Think Panama. NHK Broadcasting, Japan’s equivalent of the BBC, contacted me last month, wanting a statement on the American public’s reaction to the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations. A super-sized NAFTA, the TransPacific Partnership is a free-trade agreement whereby countries give foreign corporations rights and privileges to encourage investment and global business. The TPP was a major issue during Japan’s recent national elections, when thousands took tothe streets in protest. It was hard for the Japanese journalist to believe me when I explained that…

  • The Bright Side of the Money Crisis

    James Trimarco
    6 May 2013 | 10:55 am
    YES! is proud to be a media sponsor for the national tour of Money and Life. Interested? What Would a Down-to-Earth Economy Look Like?How did we end up with Wall Street when models for a healthy economy are all around us? Vandana Shiva: Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the ForestToday, at a time of multiple crises, we need to move away from thinking of nature as dead matter to valuing her biodiversity, clean water, and seeds. For this, nature herself is the best teacher. Four Steps to Less Wasteful CommunitiesThe individual actions we take to reduce waste are important. But to stem the…

  • Not Your Father’s Union Movement: NYC’s Young Workers Committee

    James Trimarco
    3 May 2013 | 2:35 pm
    Interested? How Workers Laid Off from a Chicago Factory Took It Over ThemselvesWhen their boss tried to fire them, the workers of Republic Windows and Doors occupied the factory. Now they own it as a cooperative. Hot and Crusty Bakery Workers Seal the Deal on UnionizationBack in September, YES! covered the efforts of immigrant workers at New York City’s Hot and Crusty Bakery to form a union. After a series of twists and turns that tested the workers’ persistence, the shop is now set to open in December with a fully unionized workforce. Walmart Strikes Fire Up Low-Wage Workers, Despite…

  • From Housing to Health Care, 7 Co-ops That Are Changing Our Economy

    Claudia Rowe
    23 Apr 2013 | 6:05 pm
    Shown here: Janvieve Williams Comrie and Omar Freilla are surrounded by Co-op Academy graduates. Co-ops represented from left to right: Caracol Interpreters, Ginger Moon, Green Worker Cooperatives, HTINK, and Concrete Green. Photo by Stephen O'Byrne. 1. Green Worker Cooperative’s Co-op Academy
, The Bronx, N.Y. Ideas for co-ops may flourish, but few people understand exactly how to make theirs real. The Co-op Academy is providing answers. Founded four years ago by Omar Freilla (who recently made Ebony magazine’s list of the Power 100), the academy runs 16-week courses that offer…
 
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    Central Bank News

  • South Africa holds rate on inflation risk, cuts GDP forecast

    centralbanknews.info
    23 May 2013 | 7:12 am
        South Africa's central bank held its benchmark repurchase rate steady at 5.0 percent, as expected, but cut its growth forecast and appealed for price and wage restraint to avoid higher inflation.    The South African Reserve Bank (SARB), which cut rates by 50 basis points in 2012, painted a bleak picture, saying domestic growth prospects were fragile, consumer confidence was low, the mining sector was plagued by continuing disruptions, the supply of electricity was constrained and the global economic environment was weak.    "Given the current unsettled…

  • Central Bank News Link List - May 23, 2013: Bank of Japan moves after key bond yield spikes

    centralbanknews.info
    23 May 2013 | 5:27 am
    Here's today's Central Bank News' link list, click through if you missed the previous link list. The list comprises news about central banks that is not covered by Central Bank News. The list is updated during the day with the latest developments so readers don't miss any important news.Bank of Japan moves after key bond yield spikes (AFP)U.S. central bank not "that close" to winding down stimulus - Bullard (Reuters)ECB seeks new tools while Fed toys with exit (Reuters)Polish central bankers' focus shifts to low inflation (Dow Jones)Flaherty says he's worried by loose policies…

  • Ghana raises rate 100 bsp on growing risks to inflation

    centralbanknews.info
    22 May 2013 | 7:13 am
        Ghana's central bank raised its policy rate by 100 basis points to 16.0 percent, saying the growing risks to the inflation outlook outweighed the risks to economic growth.    The Bank of Ghana, which raised its rate 250 basis points last year in response to rising inflation, said inflation in April rose for the third month in a row, pushing up the bank's central path of its forecast by a percentage point.    In addition to its rate rise, the central bank said it was realigning its policy corridor by widening the band. The reverse repo rate will now be 200…

  • Central Bank News Link List - May 22, 2013: Bernanke suggests Fed not ready to pull back on stimulus

    centralbanknews.info
    22 May 2013 | 5:11 am
    Here's today's Central Bank News' link list, click through if you missed the previous link list. The list comprises news about central banks that is not covered by Central Bank News. The list is updated during the day with the latest developments so readers don't miss any important news.Bernanke suggests Fed not ready to pull back on stimulus (Reuters)King defeated again as BOE majority watches for inflation (Bloomberg)BOJ Kuroda: L-T rates unlikely to jump, ops flexible (MNI)IMF urges U.K. coalition to ease back on austerity (Dow Jones)Bank of Korea's Kim sees Fed exit spurring…

  • Japan maintains QE targets, says economy picking up

    centralbanknews.info
    21 May 2013 | 9:01 pm
        The Bank of Japan (BOJ) maintained its aim of expanding the monetary base by an annual 60-70 trillion yen, along with purchases of Japanese government bonds and other securities, and voiced confidence that the economy was now picking up speed and consumer prices would start to rise.    The BOJ, which launched its "new phase of monetary easing" in early April, said it would continue with its plan to buy government bonds so their outstanding amount rises by 50 trillion yen a year and the average remaining maturity of these purchases will be about seven years. …
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    Business Insider

  • P&G CEO Bob McDonald Steps Down After Pressure From Bill Ackman, Activist Investor (PG)

    Jim Edwards
    23 May 2013 | 6:59 pm
    Bob McDonald, the 59-year-old CEO of Procter & Gamble and a 33-year veteran of the company, has stepped down suddenly. He will be replaced by an old hand: his predecessor, A.G. Lafley (presumably on a temporary basis — Lafley's 65 and has already been CEO once before). P&G is the world's largest advertiser, with a global media budget of more than $10 billion annually. The move comes after pressure from activist investor Bill Ackman, according to Forbes: McDonald was thought to be in jeopardy of losing his job last summer after a string of reductions to profit forecasts…

  • This 6-Person Startup 'Won' SXSW — And It's Nearly Profitable After Just One Year

    Megan Rose Dickey
    23 May 2013 | 6:50 pm
    When you think of event planning and ticketing services, companies like Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, Ticketfly, and Ticketleap probably come to mind. But event planners often times need more than just ticketing services.  Enter Splash, a one-stop shop for planning events, selling tickets, and engaging with attendees after the event.  At South by Southwest, the one-year-old startup powered nearly 200 events and collected 384,000 RSVPs, Splash CEO Ben Hindman tells Business Insider. "It's clear, the "winner" of SXSW13: @splashthat," Union Square Venture analyst…

  • Foreigners Are Piling Into Japanese Stocks In A Way They Haven't Done In Years [CHART]

    Joe Weisenthal
    23 May 2013 | 6:32 pm
    The gyrations of the last two days aside, here's a good representation of how the Japan trade is captivating the global investing class. Michael McDonough of BloombergBriefs.com tweets this photo which really drives home how much money has come in this year vs. recent years. Please follow Money Game on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

  • 15 Startups Leading The Hardware Revolution

    Kevin Smith
    23 May 2013 | 6:01 pm
    New hardware companies are one of the hottest trends in the startup world.  Instead of building apps and Web services, companies are building real physical hardware that you can buy and use.  A lot of these find life on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, where the community votes with its wallet on what gadget they want to use. Most notably, there's Pebble, a company that makes smartwatches, and Ouya, a company that makes an Android-based video console. Both companies have raised millions in regular VC money after seeing success on Kickstarter. But they're not alone. Check out some…

  • The 14 Lucky Early Employees And 3 Investors Behind The $1.1 Billion Tumblr Deal

    Alyson Shontell
    23 May 2013 | 5:56 pm
    Tumblr was recently acquired by Yahoo for $1.1 billion. Which early employees hit the jackpot with their stock options? We rounded up 14 of the earliest employees at Tumblr. They were the site's first users, template designers, and friends of David Karp's. They didn't all have stock options that vested, but many of them did. Some went on to found successful companies of their own too. Tumblr's first employee was Marco Arment, who went on to found and sell Instapaper. Another early Tumblr employee, Jared Hecht, went on to sell a startup, GroupMe, to Skype for ~ $80 million. See how they…
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    The Conversation - Business + Economy

  • Who owns Superman? The Man of Steel fights trademark law

    Matthew Rimmer, ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor in Intellectual Property at Australian National University
    23 May 2013 | 10:16 pm
    Who is Superman’s greatest threat? Evil genius Lex Luthor? General Zod from the Phantom Zone? The doppelganger Bizarro? Super-villain Brainiac? Kryptonite? Or is it intellectual property law? In 2013, DC Comics and Warner Brothers have sought to reboot the Superman movie franchise with the new film Man of Steel. Man of Steel Trailer The film is directed by Zac Synder and produced by Christopher Nolan, who successfully revived Batman with the Dark Knight trilogy. Snyder observes that Superman is a “cool mythological contradiction”. The director observes: “He’s incredibly familiar…

  • Can banks make a profit by investing in the Great Barrier Reef?

    Melissa Bos, PhD Researcher, Marine Conservation Finance at James Cook University
    23 May 2013 | 8:36 pm
    Earlier this month, Australia’s Big Four banks copped a serve over their support of the coal and gas extraction industries, focusing attention on the ways large banks' investment decisions can put the future of the Great Barrier Reef at risk. A study conducted by Friends of the Earth-affiliate Market Forces with global environmental group 350.org calculated Westpac, the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ and NAB have lent A$3.8 billion since 2008 for energy projects in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. The groups called for people to “put their banks on notice” that if they “continue to…

  • Ford's exit spells the end of the road for manufacturing

    Remy Davison, Jean Monnet Chair in Politics and Economics at Monash University
    23 May 2013 | 1:36 pm

  • The future for Ford workers: literacy will be key

    Stewart Riddle, Lecturer in Literacies Education at University of Southern Queensland
    23 May 2013 | 1:36 pm
    Yesterday’s announcement that Ford will close its manufacturing operations in Geelong and Broadmeadows by 2016 at the cost of 1,200 jobs raises questions of what the workers' future employment options are. But as these workers consider their futures, we need to understand that nearly half of Australian adults are considered functionally illiterate. And manufacturing workers in Victoria, which includes those in the firing line at Ford, were found to have even lower literacy skills, with 54% scoring at the lowest levels. The data are alarming and there are now serious concerns about these…

  • Ford's exit foreshadows a looming reality check for Australian manufacturing

    Paul Gollan, Associate Dean, Research and Professor of Management, Faculty of Business and Economics at Macquarie University
    22 May 2013 | 10:32 pm
    Today’s announcement by Ford Australia President Bob Graziano that the car company will exit Australian manufacturing by 2016 is not a surprise for anyone who has been paying attention to the fortunes of the manufacturing industry. After announcing an after-tax loss for 2012 of $141 million, coupled with five year losses totalling approximately $600 million, Graziano confirmed it would close its last remaining Victorian manufacturing centres at Geelong and Broadmeadows, cutting 1200 staff. Despite $34 million worth of federal government financial assistance announced last year, the losses,…
 
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    Mindful Money » Shaun Richards

  • Aren’t central bankers supposed to provide stability rather than enhance chaos theory?

    Shaun Richards
    23 May 2013 | 3:24 am
    Yesterday came an example of one of the flaws in the world economic structure and indeed in financial markets. In response to testimony by the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke financial markets surged and then plummeted. If we look at the Dow Jones equity index we saw it rise by 150 points and then fall by over 200 to close a net 80 points lower at 15,307. This pattern was pretty much repeated in the US government bond market where there were price rises followed by a sharp drop. The drop was enough to push the ten-year yield above the 2% barrier as it closed at 2.03%. What…

  • What are the thoughts of the next Bank of England Governor Mark Carney?

    Shaun Richards
    22 May 2013 | 3:03 am
    Yesterday the incoming Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney gave a speech on Canada entitled “Canada Works” but in it we did receive some clues as to his thinking about wider issues. One theme we can easily spot is what a good job he thinks Canada has done with its economic policy (no signs of modesty there…) which I will return to in a moment but there were also sweeping critiques of policy elsewhere. Despite recent progress, the U.S. economy has not yet achieved escape velocity. So we know that “escape velocity” is likely to be a familiar phrase in the…

  • Why didn’t the UK’s economic contraction and then stagnation lead to falling prices?

    Shaun Richards
    21 May 2013 | 2:46 am
    Today sees the publication of the UK inflation figures for April which are likely to show for the first time in a while a fall in the rate of annual inflation. However whilst this dip is welcome it will remain over target which will make it some 41 months in a row that this has been the case. To show the significance of this in relation to UK economic policy making I would like to take you back to the Bank of England Inflation Report of May 2009 which told us this. Inflation is likely to fall back sharply over the next few months…..inflation is more likely to be below the target than…

  • How is the Abenomics economic experiment going in Japan?

    Shaun Richards
    20 May 2013 | 3:44 am
    This morning has already seen plenty of action in the markets of the Far East with the price of Silver falling by 7% at one point before recovering to around 4% down at US $21.40 as I type this. However if we move to my subject of today there were also wild swings in the exchange rate of the Japanese Yen which were initially triggered by these words uttered on Japanese television by economy minister Amari. It’s being said excessive yen gains have been corrected a lot……….If the yen extends losses a lot, people’s lives will be negatively affected. It’s our job to…

  • How is monetary policy set for Germany working out for Spain?

    Shaun Richards
    17 May 2013 | 3:50 am
    This week has seen various updates on the economies in the Euro area. The net effect for the overall economy was that it shrunk by 0.1% in the first quarter of 2013 and was 1% smaller than in the same period in 2012. However Spain was something of an outlier in the data both in that it had produced its statistics before this week and that its economy had shrunk by 0.5% and 2% respectively. So not only a worse performance over the past year but an apparent relative acceleration. Also her year on year performance was her worst since the initial shock impact of the credit crunch. If we go back a…
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    LINUX & WINDOWS TIPS

  • Technology To Protect Planet

    admin
    16 May 2013 | 5:00 pm
    Living with this 21st century provides pressured website visitors to get involved with the particular clean technologies that is referred to as Environmentally friendly Technology. Fractional treatments may be the mix of enviromentally friendly technology along with latest technology to shield environmental surroundings along with means to alleviate the undesirable impact involving man motion on this planet. eco-friendly technology is focused on finest development that’s not only implemented to the globe, but also to produce our own company a lot more successful. It is a great way of…

  • Online Marketing Technology

    admin
    10 Apr 2013 | 5:00 pm
    A lots of folks that are usually somewhat new to be able to Internet marketing generally get stuck somewhere in the act associated with determining your ‘back end’ technologies. They aren’t positive precisely what internet hosting will be, or perhaps the best way to work it. They’ve got not a clue how much of an FTP consumer is actually. They’re afraid to dying about forcing any squeeze page as well as internet site. They do not understand just how auto-responders operate or even the way to put any PayPal option on a web page. They are they must possess a The…

  • Making a user friendly website

    admin
    17 Mar 2013 | 9:02 am
    There are many things that can recommend a website or make it constantly drive away visitors, but one of the most important aspects of every website is how user friendly it is. Apart from the obvious reason of attracting and retaining visitors, there are other, less obvious things that having a user oriented site can help you with. Search engine optimization is just one of those things. With Google striving to provide for the best search experience possible, the focus of their algorithm is constantly shifting toward the user experience, which means that the things you do to make the users…
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    SurvivalBlog.com

  • Notes from JWR:

    Jim Rawles
    23 May 2013 | 4:53 pm
    JRH Enterprises is running a Memorial Day sale through June 1st on FLIR Scout Series thermal imagers. These are ideal for retreat security. The Scout PS24 FLIR is on sale for $1,850 and the FLIR PS32 Thermal camera which offers higher resolution and 2X magnification greatly increasing the range for $2,795. JRH also has on sale the DBAL-I2 Infrared and visible laser sighting system for use with your night vision device available. Today we present another entry for Round 46 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. The prizes for this round include: First Prize: A.) Gunsite Academy Three…

  • When Bugging Out is Not an Option: Hunkering Down with a Quadriplegic, by Steven in Alabama

    Jim Rawles
    23 May 2013 | 4:52 pm
    I’ve always considered myself and my family extremely blessed.  I also am a firm believer that God expects you to make the most out of what you have.  God gave me a wonderful wife and 3 healthy, strong boys.  We are a hard working family who have always had goals and planned well for the future.  We even had a bug-out plan when not many other folks even talked about such things.  Our world took a drastic turn a little over a year ago when my oldest son was injured in a high school wrestling accident.  In the blink of an eye my son became a C4C5…

  • Letter Re: Checking Your Handguns for Feeding Problems: Round Nose Versus Hollow Points

    Jim Rawles
    23 May 2013 | 4:50 pm
    Sir, For those with hollowpoint feeding problems with their pistols, I’d like to recommend the Dremel 516 Abrasive Point, which is bullet-shaped. Here is manufacturer's description: "Abrasive point, bullet shaped constructed of compressed non-woven nylon fibers that have been impregnated with aluminum oxide abrasive grains. These abrasive points are great for finishing work and light deburring."   I find it works well by polishing the feed ramp to a mirror finish as well as lightly rounding the sharp edges of the chamber end of a new barrel.  I stumbled upon this…

  • Economics and Investing:

    Jim Rawles
    23 May 2013 | 4:49 pm
    We saw this coming: Global Market Rout Spreads Reader Denise in Florida spotted this: Ceiling suspended: US takes on $300 billion in new debt after hitting $16.7 trillion. The article begins: "America’s ticking debt bomb has been reset. Washington has suspended the debt ceiling, setting a date, and not a concrete dollar sum as a deadline, an unprecedented first in US history." Fed's Dudley: Will Take 3 to 4 Months to Decide on Tapering. JWR's Comment: In my estimation The Fed, Treasury, and their derivatives trading clients are now so addicted to QE that they will utterly…

  • Odds 'n Sods:

    Jim Rawles
    23 May 2013 | 4:48 pm
    Reader F.G. sent us links to a curious disparity: Scientists say united on global warming, at odds with public view: "(Reuters) - Ninety-seven percent of scientists say global warming is mainly man-made but a wide public belief that experts are divided is making it harder to gain support for policies to curb climate change, an international study showed on Thursday." But then we also read: Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis. "Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis,…
 
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    Trading Heroes

  • TTL 011 – Why (and how) 50 Pips Trades Forex For A Living

    Hugh Kimura
    16 May 2013 | 11:48 am
    Welcome to episode 11 of The Trading Lifestyle Podcast.  In this episode, I’m happy to present an interview that I did with 50 Pips.  No, he is not a rapper, but he does trade for a living and he mentors traders from time-to-time. He is also an excellent Forex trading resource to follow on Twitter.  That is how I originally found out about him. He tweets trading tips and levels that he is watching on a daily basis. This interview was unique because 50 requested that I don’t ask the interview questions that I would normally ask.  This is because he was interviewed back in 2010…

  • How I Lost 30 Pounds In 2 Months By Eating More Bacon And Not Doing Crossfit, P90X Or Running More

    Hugh Kimura
    7 May 2013 | 6:18 pm
    Like most people, I have been trying to solve the weight loss puzzle for years.  But it seemed like no matter what I tried, it would never work.  My weight would go down a little then go right back to “normal.”  Other people were getting results from these workouts or diets, so I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong. That being said, I believe that different things are going to work for different people.  Some people swear by CrossFit, The Slow Carb Diet or some crazy juice diet.  It’s all about finding what works for you. Just to be clear, I’m not talking…

  • AUDJPY Thoughts For April 25, 2013

    Hugh Kimura
    25 Apr 2013 | 10:05 am
    Good Morning! I woke up this morning to check the current trade that I have on and was happy to find that it is still going as expected.  So I thought that it would be helpful to sit down and review why I took the trade and what I’m currently thinking about the AUDJPY. This trade is what Walter Peters would call a “naked” trade because there were no indicators involved, only price action.  If you remember my post about the backtest that I did with the AUDJPY, I found that it is beneficial to only go long in this pair and that pin bars can be a really simple entry…

  • TTL 010 – How Rafael Veron Taught His Wife To Trade Better Than Fund Managers

    Hugh Kimura
    23 Apr 2013 | 7:14 pm
    We are back with another episode of the Trading Lifestyle Podcast and this month I had the pleasure of interviewing Rafael Veron, an Independent Trader from Toronto, Canada.  He used to trade for a hedge fund, but he now trades his own money from home. Independent Professional Trader Rafael Veron Rafael has had many interesting experiences in his career and started from very humble beginnings.  He definitely paid his dues along his way to trading for a living.  He has been a gopher, janitor, broker, money allocator and more.  But he is thankful for these experiences because they taught…

  • What Is Your Trading Personality Timeframe?

    Hugh Kimura
    16 Apr 2013 | 5:00 am
    This is a concept that took me awhile to understand, but I feel that it is very important, so I hope that you get something out of this post.  One of the biggest things that you have to figure out in your trading is your Trading Timeframe Personality.  I fought this for awhile and I was able to do OK, but once I realized that my true nature wanted to do something else, things became easier. I’m not saying that this is the only thing that you should pay attention to, but it is one of the big pieces.  So if you haven’t found yours yet, think about this… What Is A Trading…
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    OpenMarkets

  • How Changing Economics Are Changing Oil Benchmarks

    Debbie Carlson
    23 May 2013 | 2:28 pm
    The changing economics of the global energy industry are changing how benchmark prices are being used to hedge risk and this transformation is likely to continue for the next several years. The three biggest exchange-traded contracts – CME Group’s NYMEX West Texas Intermediate crude oil, Intercontinental Exchange’s Brent crude oil and the Dubai Mercantile Exchange’s Oman crude oil contract – are all heavily traded markets. Currently the Brent crude oil contract is considered the global benchmark, but some market watchers said because of the sweeping changes occurring in the U.S.

  • Market Update: Bernanke Talks Economy

    OpenMarkets
    22 May 2013 | 3:21 pm
    Jack Bouroudjian notes the markets’ take on the Fed’s comments about the economy.

  • OTC Clearing: Phase Two of Swaps Clearing for Dodd-Frank is Only Weeks Away

    Jack Callahan
    22 May 2013 | 6:45 am
    New global rules for OTC derivatives have been implemented in the US and are imminent in Europe that will have significant long-term implications for how hedge funds, asset managers and regional banks execute, clear, and report their swap positions. In particular, June 10, 2013, represents the second phase of the OTC clearing mandate that is required under the Dodd-Frank legislation. This means that those firms defined as part of Category 2 (hedge funds, asset managers and regional banks) that trade swaps must move very quickly to finalize central clearing arrangements. Firms must act now to…

  • What Happens After QE?

    Suzanne Cosgrove
    21 May 2013 | 10:57 pm
    Attend a speech by any Federal Reserve official, and you will hear this question from the audience: When will the Fed start tapering its purchases of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities? Currently, the Fed purchases about $85 billion assets each month – $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities and agency debt and $45 billion in Treasuries – as part of its third round of quantitative easing, or QE3.  But a reduction or cessation of those purchases “depends on the economy, especially labor market conditions,” says Ray Stone, managing director of Princeton, N.J.-based Stone and…

  • How Rail is Reshaping America’s Energy System

    Debbie Carlson
    20 May 2013 | 10:39 pm
      Railroads, that 19th-century technology, are having a 21st-century impact on the U.S. crude oil industry. The swift growth in U.S. petroleum production left the energy industry with a lot of crude oil and nowhere to send it. With pipelines full, energy companies began to look at shipping crude oil via rail, the way it was transported when the U.S. energy industry was in its infancy over 100 years ago. What was first seen as a stop-gap measure to deal with extra output is now being considered a viable complement to pipelines and a permanent part of the energy infrastructure in the U.S.
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    azizonomics

  • Printing Food…

    Aziz
    21 May 2013 | 2:40 pm
    NASA is funding the development of a printer for food: Of course, its immediate application is as an experimental technology to feed hungry astronauts in space. This is getting interestingly close to the fantasies of a Star Trek-style food replicator. Consumers go to the store, buy cartridges of nutrients and flavourings, load them into their printer, download some recipes from the internet, print, and eat. It may be early to hypothesise about costs, but I hypothesise that 3-D printing foodstuffs may massively lower the costs — both in material inputs and in monetary inputs — of…

  • Ben Bernanke Is Right About Interconnective Innovation

    Aziz
    18 May 2013 | 12:21 pm
    I’d just like to double down on Ben Bernanke’s comments on why he is optimistic about the future of human economic progress in the long run: Pessimists may be paying too little attention to the strength of the underlying economic and social forces that generate innovation in the modern world. Invention was once the province of the isolated scientist or tinkerer. The transmission of new ideas and the adaptation of the best new insights to commercial uses were slow and erratic. But all of that is changing radically. We live on a planet that is becoming richer and more populous, and…

  • Of Joseph & Keynes

    Aziz
    16 May 2013 | 1:55 pm
    Although Keynes’ conceptual framework for macroeconomics was original, the economic ideas broadly known as Keynesianism — the possibility of unclearing markets, and countercyclical spending — are much older than John Maynard Keynes, and their continued predominating association with him is rather puzzling to me. Indeed, looking at Keynes’ ideas through the lens of his predecessors is illuminating. According to Genesis in the Old Testament, in ancient Egypt, Joseph son of Jacob warned the Pharaoh that his dreams foretold seven years of abundant harvest to be followed by seven…

  • Nietzsche, Austrianism, Neoclassicalism & Subjectivism

    Aziz
    13 May 2013 | 3:55 pm
    Cory Robin has an enormous, sprawling treatise at The Nation on the influence that Nietzsche may have had first on marginalist economics (Jevons, Walras, Menger) and second on modern free market economics: The contributions of Jevons and Menger were multiple, yet each of them took aim at a central postulate of economics shared by everyone from Adam Smith to the socialist left: the notion that labor is a—if not the—source of value. Though adumbrated in the idiom of prices and exchange, the labor theory of value evinced an almost primitive faith in the metaphysical objectivity of the…

  • The Long Run

    Aziz
    11 May 2013 | 8:41 am
    Niall Ferguson’s misunderstanding of Keynes led me to the question of how humans should balance the present against the long run? It’s hard for us primates to have a real clue about the long run — the chain of events that may occur, the kind of world that will form. In the long run — the billions of years for which Earth has existed — modern human civilisation is a flash, a momentary pulsation of order imposed by primates on the face of the Earth — modern cities, roads, ports, oil wells, telecommunications and so forth built up over a little more than a century, a little…
 
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    eWallstreeter

  • France Private Sector Implosion Continues

    23 May 2013 | 10:36 pm
    Here's some news that caught my eye earlier today when I was on the road: The Markit Flash France PMI® shows French private sector output continues to fall at marked rate in May. Key points: Flash France Composite Output Index unchanged at 44.3 Flash France Services Activity Index unchanged at 44.3 Flash France Manufacturing PMI rises to 45.5 (44.4 in April), 9-month high Flash France Manufacturing Output Index up to 44.3 (44.1 in April), 9-month high Summary: The downturn in French private sector output continued in May. Unmoved from April’s reading, the Markit Flash France Composite…

  • In Bid for Clarity, Fed Delivers Opacity

    23 May 2013 | 9:57 pm
    Fed chief Ben Bernanke knows clear communication is key to managing market expectations for the central bank's bond-buying program, but discordant voices make clarity easier said than done.

  • Chinese Data Cast Global Pall

    23 May 2013 | 8:37 pm
    New data suggesting contraction in Chinese manufacturing have cast further doubt about growth in the world's No. 2 economy, hitting markets as investors worry about the implications for the global outlook.

  • A World of Debt

    23 May 2013 | 8:00 pm
    Asian nations are amassing debt, according to an article in today's Journal, but the whole world has boosted borrowing in the past decade.

  • Obama nominates Senate aides to serve as SEC commissioners

    23 May 2013 | 7:09 pm
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama nominated two U.S. Senate aides on Thursday to serve as members of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the White House said in a statement.
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    The Monetary Future

  • 6 New Bitcoin Educational Resources

    18 May 2013 | 2:34 am
    By Jon Matonis Forbes Monday, May 13, 2013 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/05/13/6-new-bitcoin-educational-resources/ In the fast-moving Bitcoin world, it’s crucial to stay up to date with the latest in educational resources and new media. The last two months have seen an explosion in media attention and a desire for new users to learn as much as possible about the global bitcoin economy. It is within this spirit that I present the latest Bitcoin educational resources to hit the web: CoinDesk – This London-based resource and news operation aims to be the “Reuters of…

  • CardFlight's Tech May Someday Give Lift to New Payment Systems

    18 May 2013 | 2:28 am
    By Jon Matonis PaymentsSource Monday, May 13, 2013 http://www.paymentssource.com/news/cardflights-tech-may-someday-give-lift-to-new-payment-systems-3014106-1.html Typically, I don't cover or analyze so-called payments innovations that merely embrace and extend the legacy infrastructure, but a new middleware startup, CardFlight, could actually operate as a payments "air traffic controller" because its code sits directly between the consumer and the processor. CardFlight announced the availability of a private beta last week for the iOS and Android platforms. Its encrypted magnetic-stripe card…

  • Money Laundering Is Financial Thoughtcrime

    12 May 2013 | 10:04 am
    By Jon Matonis American Banker Tuesday, May 7, 2013 http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/money-laundering-is-financial-thoughtcrime-1058902-1.html When people hear the term money laundering today, they envision the most evil of acts, in which gangsters process satchels of cash through a fabricated company to show it as business revenue. Words and semantics are very important in this post-9/11 world, and as far as creating a negative connotation, that parlance has been extremely effective. At its essence, money laundering is the act of concealing money or assets from the state to prevent…

  • Bitcoin On The PayPal Network

    10 May 2013 | 5:48 am
    By Jon Matonis Forbes Saturday, May 4, 2013 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/05/04/bitcoin-on-the-paypal-network/ PayPal has recently entertained the notion of accepting and clearing the bitcoin unit on its pervasive platform. It’s a bit like the prince joining the revolution. Is this a good thing? Naturally, some bitcoin businesses will see this as PayPal moving in to usurp bitcoin’s popularity and momentum in the marketplace. But, depending on your outlook, it may not be all negative and it raises the identical issues that a bank would face if embracing bitcoin, especially…

  • The Elephant In The Payments Room

    4 May 2013 | 12:36 am
    By Jon Matonis American Banker Monday, April 29, 2013 http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/the-elephant-in-the-payments-room-bitcoin-1058703-1.html The payments industry has been ripe for disruption for as long as I can remember. Historically conservative and non-experimental, banking and financial services always appear to be the laggard for any new technology. But none of that has stopped recent innovators from pursuing things like Square, Stripe, Dwolla, FaceCash, ZooZ, Affirm, MangoPay, and Balanced. The Internet and mobile payments gold rush is in full swing and venture capitalists…
 
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    Columbia Business School: Ideas At Work RSS

  • A Better Standard for Credit Risk

    16 May 2013 | 7:24 am
    Financial crises across the world’s banking system are nothing new, having occurred regularly — if not always predictably — throughout history. Banks, investors, and regulators have sought ways to report and analyze credit risk and profitability as a means to head off such crises, but just how to measure these objectively and fairly remains controversial. For most banks, lending is the primary activity and source of value creation. Loan yield provides a good estimate of expected interest income. Banks can estimate just how much value they are creating by subtracting expected…

  • Could Uncertainty Cause a Recession?

    29 Apr 2013 | 11:13 am
    Just over five years ago, the United States entered a period of economic decline that would become known as the Great Recession. Although essentially nothing had changed in the country’s productive capacity, it experienced a sharp drop in output, employment, and consumer consumption. And though there is widespread agreement that some contraction was inevitable in the housing sector, questions remain about how the crisis spread to manufacturing and throughout the broader economy. New research by Professor Saki Bigio addresses these issues. Bigio sees recessions as periods of great…

  • Climate Change and Productivity

    29 Apr 2013 | 11:12 am
    Extreme weather can wreak havoc on cities and their economies. Damage from hurricanes Katrina and Sandy is estimated at more than $150 billion and over $60 billion, respectively. Weather-based power failures and disruptions to transportation systems can delay commuters, stall deliveries, and choke supply chains. And even where extreme conditions are common, economic life suffers. Regions with hot, wet climates are less productive on average. Professor Marcelo Olivares wanted definitive evidence to show whether — and how much — extreme weather affects productivity. Olivares’…

  • Precise Offers Are Potent Anchors: Conciliatory Counteroffers and Attributions of Knowledge in Negotiations

    29 Apr 2013 | 8:26 am
    In making opening offers, people generally use round numbers — listing a car for $10,000, instead of $10,125. New research by Professors Malia Mason and Daniel Ames and doctoral students Alice Lee and Elizabeth Wiley highlights the folly in this round number habit and reveals that negotiators can be more effective when they use precisely expressed opening offers. According to the researchers, the precision with which a negotiator conveys an opening offer — as $100 versus $98 or $102 — signals his or her confidence in its appropriateness. Negotiators who make precise first…

  • What Really Moves Us?

    27 Mar 2013 | 1:57 pm
    What’s wrong with viewing motivation as a function of the hedonic principle — that we are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain? For thousands of years we’ve simply accepted this idea that in all cases, “carrots” motivate people to do something they want and “sticks” motivate people to stop doing something they don’t want. We all think this way: managers with their employees, parents with their children, teachers and coaches with their students. One of the reasons for writing the book is to say that while that is not wrong, it is extremely…
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    Monetary Realism

  • Cicadas are back and so is the debt ceiling

    beowulf
    14 May 2013 | 6:50 pm
    Joe Firestone writes a piece over at Correntewire to report that strange doings are afoot at the Circle K House of Representatives. On May 9, 2013, The Republican House passed H.R. 807 the Full Faith and Credit Act. The Bill says in part: (a) In General- In the event that the debt of the United States Government, as defined in section 3101 of title 31, United States Code, reaches the statutory limit, the Secretary of the Treasury shall, in addition to any other authority provided by law, issue obligations under chapter 31 of title 31, United States Code, to pay with legal tender, and solely…

  • Bitcoins, Fractional Reserve Banking, and Private Currencies

    Michael Sankowski
    2 May 2013 | 6:14 am
    All of this started in an exchange I had with Steve Waldman a few weeks ago on twitter. Is fractional reserve banking possible with bitcoin? Well the answer is “NO”, and “yes”. SqueekyWheel makes a great point: “I think you misunderstand the bitcoin version of fractional reserve – it’s a bit more like gold standard fractional reserve. Let’s take “BitBank” which has 20 bitcoins. I go and take a 10 bitcoin loan from ‘BitBank’. BitBank credits my BitBank account with 10 bitcoins – but does not use the Bitcoin system to transfer them. If I spend those…

  • Bitcoins: Too valuable to Use as Money

    Michael Sankowski
    27 Apr 2013 | 11:43 am
    All Hail Bitcoin. If bitcoin is to capture 10% of the U.S. transactions involved with GDP in 15 years, it needs to grow in value at 61%+ per year during that time.  I think 15 years is a good amount of time as a rough and ready indication of what can happen on the internet, given that Google is just about 15 years old. Todays GDP is $15.09 T. The total value of bitcoin is $1B.  If bitcoin is to take 10% of the GDP transactions today, the value of bitcoins would need to grow in value to match the total amount, divided by the monetary velocity of bitcoins. The way to value bitcoins in the…

  • Solar is about to Change our World

    Michael Sankowski
    18 Apr 2013 | 6:12 pm
    I’ve been getting into Solar lately – the fall in prices has been absolutely shocking over the last 2-4 years. We are seeing price drops closer to 20% per year after several decades at 6% price drops per year. 6% year is a fantastic rate of decreases, but 20% is simply astonishing. 20% is an impressive number, but putting it into context will make your jaw drop with astonishment. My calculations show that if solar maintains 5 more years at current 23% rates per year price drops, solar power will be cheaper than using existing coal plants. That’s right – it will be…

  • Robot Fiscal Policy

    Michael Sankowski
    5 Apr 2013 | 3:24 am
    A few days ago, I complained that Matt Yglesias seemed to be ripping off Monetary Realism posts, or at least riffing on them. selise pointed out perhaps “great minds think alike” and well, I guess it is in the air. I then said he would start writing about automating fiscal policy because we were writing about it. I was totally wrong in asking if Matt Y would ever talk about automating fiscal policy, because it turns out he had just written an article on it. I had flagged this Matt Yglesias post for commenting a few weeks back, and somehow I forgot about it until now. Still, MR…
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    ftmdaily.com

  • Perspectives: The Glorious Casino of Wall Street

    Jerry Robinson
    23 May 2013 | 7:29 pm
    Big money is being made again in the stock markets. But should you invest?Author informationJerry RobinsonInvestor/Writer at FTMDaily.comJerry Robinson is a serial entrepreneur, economist, published... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

  • Student Loan Crisis Burdens the U.S. Economy

    FTMDaily.com
    23 May 2013 | 8:46 am
    The average student debt for 25 year-olds nearly doubled in the last nine years. We haven't even begun to see the long-term effects of this crisis.Author informationFTMDaily.comOur mission at Follow... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

  • Perspectives: Unchartered Territory

    Jerry Robinson
    22 May 2013 | 7:15 pm
    The stock market fell today on news that the FOMC Minutes showed some Fed governors wanted to begin pulling back on QE in the month of June.Author informationJerry RobinsonInvestor/Writer at... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

  • Perspectives – 5/19/13

    Jerry Robinson
    19 May 2013 | 4:00 am
    Last week we enjoyed a nice rise in our stock holdings as the global equity markets continue to spike higher courtesy of the worldwide campaign of monetary easing. This week, I am particularly... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

  • Signs in the Sun, Moon, and Stars

    FTMDaily.com
    18 May 2013 | 8:00 am
    On this week's show, Pastor Mark Biltz shares an amazing discovery: Four back-to-back lunar eclipses set to occur on the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles and Passover in 2014 and 2015. What does it mean?... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
 
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    Tao Economics

  • The Only Thing Bernanke Will Be Trimming is His Beard

    StingingNettle
    23 May 2013 | 4:12 pm
    What's with all this QE trimming? I think of it this way. The governments "official" rate of inflation is just under 2% they pat themselves on the back. They want stocks to go up. They shoot up. A lot. The stock market isn't apart of the inflation rate, but they now worry it's gone to far to fast due to their policies. They want a correction and not a wipe out. Better to correct now. They know the market is so ridiculous that it will sell off from the words of just one man. Which all amounted to... "We may or may not start trimming with in the next 6 months and if we do, we don't know the…

  • Government Pretending To Scratch Their Heads At Apples Tax Avoidance

    StingingNettle
    21 May 2013 | 8:46 am
    I'm listening to NPR this morning on the way to work and they are talking about how Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has avoided paying taxes on it's over seas income. While Apple's estimated tax payment for 2012 is $6 billion, the Senate investigators estimate that Apple avoided paying another $9 billion in taxes last year. Well, I am just shocked! The corporate tax rate in America is 40%. Did you know that? The federal corporate tax rate is 35% and when you add in state and local corporate taxes it works out to an average of 40%! (Source…

  • Stocks Keep Going Higher, Metals Keep Going Lower - Get Cash!

    StingingNettle
    19 May 2013 | 4:07 pm
    I'll try and keep this short and sweet. Stocks seem to be getting into a higher risk area and look over bought, while the metals and the miners are looking over sold. I'm not calling a top in stocks and I'm not calling a bottom in the gold, silver and the miners. What I plan on doing is saving some money in cash. I don't know when stocks will turn over, and I don't know when miners will reach a bottom. I want to wait for the market to make that decision for me. Silver is down 6% as I type, and Pan American Silver Corp NASDAQ:PAAS has a price to book ratio of .66. That is cheap! However we…

  • IRS: The Gang With No Tattoos

    StingingNettle
    13 May 2013 | 8:42 am
    Saw this headline in the Seattle Times this morning, "Report: IRS targeting went beyond ‘Tea Party’. .The Internal Revenue Service’s special scrutiny of small-government groups applying for tax-exempt status went beyond keyword hunts for organizations with “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their names, to a more overtly ideological search for applicants seeking to “make America a better place to live” or “criticize how the country is being run,” according to a part of an inspector general’s report that was given to Congress.

  • It's Time to Give Jones Soda Another Try.

    StingingNettle
    7 May 2013 | 12:38 pm
    Jones Soda (JSDA), "Independent Since '96'. Most everyone remembers Jones soda and their surge in popularity in the early 2,000's. Then they crashed, ran in to large operating costs and were unable to grow. I remember there were a lot of stories back then, and now you just don't hear to much about them anymore. Well, over the past year Jones has been seeking it's "entrepreneurial roots". The company has hired back executives that have left the company, but were apart of Jones's early success. The company has been reducing is operating costs drastically and the market seems to be finally…
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    Exchange Rates UK - Currency News

  • Euro Exchange Rate Forecast: GBP/EUR Fresh Low After Disappointing UK Retails Data

    Adam Solomon
    23 May 2013 | 2:00 am
    The Pound remained on the defensive on Wednesday and fell sharply versus the vast majority of the 16 most actively traded currencies. The UK currency slipped under 1.17 versus the Euro to the lowest level in over a month, while Sterling also traded under 1.51 against the U.S Dollar after another disappointing economic report. The latest... Exchange Rates UK - Exchange Rates and Foreign Exchange

  • Pound Dollar Exchange Rate Falls to 7 Week Low after UK Inflation Drops; Pound to Euro Falls

    Fyodor Rodion
    21 May 2013 | 8:00 am
    The Pound Sterling to Dollar exchange rate (GBP/USD) has dropped to its lowest in seven weeks after data showing British inflation dropped lower than expected in April, giving the central bank a licence to ease policy further in coming months. Britain's inflation rate fell to 2.4 percent in April from 2.8 percent in March, with almost... Exchange Rates UK - Exchange Rates and Foreign Exchange

  • Exchange Rates Today: GBP/USD Finds Support, GBP/EUR Advances Marginally, GBP/ZAR Highest Level this Year

    Adam Solomon
    21 May 2013 | 5:00 am
    The Pound Dollar exchaange rate was able to find a degree of support on moves towards 1.52 GBP/USD yesterday, while the Pound Euro exchange rate (GBP/EUR) advanced marginally, ahead of a key week of UK economic data releases that begins today. There was again a degree of optimism surrounding the housing sector following a string of surveys,... Exchange Rates UK - Exchange Rates and Foreign Exchange

  • Pound Sterling Exchange Rate Weakens Ahead of Key Week of UK Economic Data

    Adam Solomon
    20 May 2013 | 3:00 am
    The Pound Dollar exchange rate struggled to make gains above 1.5250 GBP/USD on Friday and lost ground steadily towards the U.S trading session, slipping under 1.52 by the close of trading. The March PMI manufacturing index came in at 48.3, which was slightly stronger than the March reading of 47.9, but fell short of market expectations and... Exchange Rates UK - Exchange Rates and Foreign Exchange

  • Pound to Australian Dollar Exchange Rate (GBP/AUD) Drops; GBP/ZAR Falls to 4 Year Low

    Samuel Allen
    20 May 2013 | 3:00 am
    The Pound to Australian Dollar exchange rate dropped for the first time in 3 weeks today as traders took profit, the exchange rate has risen from a low of 1.4381 GBP/AUD on 12th March to last weeks high of 1.5660 GBP/AUD, the Australian Dollar has been weakening after slower Chinese growth, lower commodity prices and a lowering of Australian... Exchange Rates UK - Exchange Rates and Foreign Exchange
 
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    BusinessClimate.com Blog

  • Pockets of Production: Cities Where Manufacturing Is Booming

    Emily McMackin
    23 May 2013 | 11:58 am
    Manufacturing may be perceived as a dying industry, but a growing number of cities across the United States are finding just the opposite to be true. From former manufacturing strongholds in the Rust Belt to up-and-coming West Coast hubs, some of the most unexpected places are experiencing an industrial renaissance. Though the economy will never recoup the 3 million industrial jobs lost since the recession, it has added more than 330,000 over the past three years. Not only is this manufacturing resurgence revitalizing production-based business throughout these regions, it’s also…

  • Highest-Paying Jobs: Wealth Equals Health

    Bill McMeekin
    20 May 2013 | 3:45 am
    It used to be that dads took their young sons out in the backyard to work on their fastball in hopes their offspring might earn a chance at the Big Leagues. Dad might better spend his time these days quizzing junior on the difference in the effectiveness of nitrous oxide and isoflurane. A new study shows the highest-paying jobs in the United States are overwhelmingly in health-care occupations, led by anesthesiologists and surgeons. Using U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, a bizjournals.com analysis found that nine of the top 10 highest-paying jobs were in health and medicine. (No. 10 was…

  • A Shot of Optimism: Production Worker Confidence Hits a New High

    Emily McMackin
    15 May 2013 | 6:00 am
    Good news for the U.S. manufacturing industry: Optimism is up among workers — in fact, it’s higher than it’s been in four years. Despite a slight dip during the first part of the year due to concerns over taxes and the federal sequester, worker confidence has peaked for the first time since the recession, according to the Randstad Manufacturing Employee Confidence Index. While the upswing in confidence has been gradual over the past few years as the economy has improved, several recent factors have contributed to the boost. Manufacturers are starting to regain their losses from…

  • Best States for Business: How Much Do Perceptions Count?

    Bill McMeekin
    13 May 2013 | 3:40 am
    In achieving CEO magazine’s Best States for Business title, it matters less who you know and more about what they think. And if you’re in a state south of the Mason-Dixon line, the odds are a lot higher that a corporate honcho feels better about you than a lot of other locations. Eight of 10 states on the 2013 Best States for Business, which asks C-level decision makers to  evaluate states based on business tax policies, regulation, workforce quality and livability factors, are in the Southeast or Southwest. If sustained and unqualified economic success is boring, then Texas is…

  • Brand Recognition: Made in America Label Builds Value, Manufacturers Take Notice

    Emily McMackin
    8 May 2013 | 6:00 am
    The Made in America label just keeps getting more valuable. As American-made products become more visible on store shelves, the number of manufacturers announcing plans to bring production back home continues to grow, according to a recent report by Reuters. FoxConn Technology Group is the latest to announce its intention to produce in the United States. The Taiwanese firm, best known for building many of Apple’s products, will make computerized glasses for Google in Santa Clara, Calif. Apple itself has stated plans to spend $100 million to build one of its Mac lines in the U.S. Joining…
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    Penury Street

  • The False Recovery: Our Obesity

    Dennis Dotem
    23 May 2013 | 7:05 am
    If you keep an eye out for the markets, as many of you do I think, you’ll see a very positive phenomena: Markets are at all time highs, US and EU markets especially. Japan’s finally coming out of its somnambulance, corporations declare great profits, China’s on the rise again, we’re finally getting out of this shit hole! Are we finally in a recovery? Or are we?The positive phenomena I described above does seem to exist.And the markets are going up, are at all time highs, but what is the reason for that? Nothing really changed that much, no…

  • Follow These 5 Steps to Save Money and Start Investing

    Dennis Dotem
    8 May 2013 | 1:11 pm
    By Neda Jafarzadeh, a financial analyst with NerdWallet Investing. NerdWallet Investing helps investors learn how to save for retirement with information on various topics such as how to roll over 401(k) accounts.Supporting yourself and your family is one of life’s most important goals, but unless you’re saving for the future, you are doing nothing more than treading water. Here are five tips for getting your finances in order and helping you begin to build towards a lifetime of financial security.1. Get rid of your debtNo matter how much debt you may have accumulated, paying it off will…

  • There’s a Market Everywhere, Even in Video Games

    Dennis Dotem
    29 Apr 2013 | 4:47 am
    A market appears where there is supply and demand. It doesn’t need a currency, it doesn’t need authority, it needs “want” and “need”. Want and Need enriches the soil on which it grows, it keeps the market running. In today’s world, The Market, with big, capital letters and an air of smug authority represents a piece of wealth, speculation and mystery not a lot of people understand.  It circulates, speculates, buys and sells, predicts and fails it is the engine of our prosperity. Our modern life has been built around stocks, and corporations,…

  • The Bitcoin Question

    Dennis Dotem
    15 Apr 2013 | 5:57 am
    Bitcoin, as many of you have already heard, is a virtual, non-centralized, finite currency, created by “mining”, a set of algorithms and calculations a computer has to solve to get coins. Most people were extremely sceptical when it was first announced and released, I myself didn’t buy into it, even when it was 2$, the whole things just didn’t seem right to me, it looked like a perfect recipe for a disaster.You’ve got a currency, which can be traded and exchanged for other “real” currencies in an open market, without ANY regulation. That’s…

  • Legalized Theft of Cyprus

    Dennis Dotem
    3 Apr 2013 | 6:32 am
    The European Union is in a big load of trouble, and the epicenter of that trouble is again the south. Earlier, in 2012, Greece was the super star of this debt-ridden debacle, eating bailout after bailout without any positive results. Its streets were destroyed by jobless, angry young people, hopeless and disillusioned. Its old were fucked by austerity, businesses closed and unemployment soared.We don’t hear about Greece anymore, not because  everything’s fine and dandy, not because the crisis was resolved, but because it doesn’t pose an imminent image threat to the…
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