September 2007
Whether you're a quant, or just someone interested in modern capital markets, MIT's Andrew Lo's new working paper on the causes of the August quant fund troubles is required reading. There is thoughtful stuff on overcrowded strategies, shorting difficulties, increases...
Here is a sneak peek at my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet: M&A deals fell 40% in the third quarter (FT) There is no credit crunch (Forbes/Fisher) China's groundwater crisis (NY Times) Spreadsheets are the real risk in...
I meant to post this funny Stephen Colbert bit earlier on the rise of the Canadian dollar, but better late than never: I'm particularly fond of the line "Sue their snow pants off"....
Had an interesting conversation with Dan diBartolomeo of Northfield yesterday, touching on, among other things, changing thinking about fat tails in the stock market. With that in mind, here is a nicely done survey of his (in presentation form) of...
Does anyone out there recall an episode of Saturday Night Live in which there was a Weekend Update wherein they talked about the stock market, saying something like, "Today on Wall Street no stocks traded. Everyone had what they wanted."Assuming...
I'm a fairly zen flyer, someone who rarely has issues when spending hours in a pressurized cylinder 6-miles above the planet, other than intense boredom and the odd outbreak of sewing-machine leg. But yesterday, on landing in San Diego after...
Some guy named Paul Kedrosky pops up on Wallstrip today....
Interesting NBER paper looking at peer effects in the workplace. While fruit pickers, grocery scanners, etc., become more or less productive in correlation with their coworkers skill level, professional golfers play roughly according to their abilities, uncorrelated with their playing...
A dream job for any young-ish readers out Yale way and interested in investments: The Yale Investments office -- which under Dave Swensen is the top-performing endowment in the country, and which just turned in a 28% gain for the...
In a generally puzzling FT article about Google's aggressive hiring plans in Europe, the prize for the strangest quote in the entire piece goes to Nelson Mattos, Google's new head of engineering in Europe:“We are not seen correctly in Europe....
In all the stories today about investor Warren Buffett's possible interest in brokerage firm Bear Stearns, why haven't the Tintonologists been trotting out any of the many quotes from Berkshire-ites about the brokerage industry. My personal favorite comes via Rick...
Nice view of fall colors from my conference hotel room in Quebec. Click for a much larger version....
I just finished moderating a pleasurable panel with my friend James "Stockpickr" Altucher. It was a nice reminder that some panels can actually be conversations....
With Tiger Woods taking the professional golf Player of the Year award today -- and now having won nine of the last eleven such awards -- here is a question: Was Tiger's 2007 the best year for any professional golfer...
From a new NBER paper, housing is the business cycle:Of the components of GDP, residential investment offers by far the best early warning sign of an oncoming recession. Since World War II we have had eight recessions preceded by substantial...
My site has been selected by BusinessWeek as one of the Best of the Web. That's awfully nice, so thanks to the folks there. I should also point out that my friend Michelle's excellent Footnoted is also on BW's list,...
The investing quote du jour goes to James Swanson of Massachusetts-based MFS, which overseas about $200-billion in assets. While he's nervous about inflation after the recent rate cuts, he can't stop himself from being bullish, however briefly: "I am concerned about...
Fun stuff from Greenwich on credit card vendors as the real angel capital providers:Greenwich Associates surveyed more than 25,000 businesses with sales of $1-10 million about their use of corporate credit cards. Among the small business owners participating in on-going...
Anyone have any experience to share on the accuracy/utility of the Mac Buyer's Guide at MacRumors? I'm curious whether it has any predictive value for the Mac Pro....
Okay, today's stock spam isn't really stock spam per se, it's more like completely nutty financial spam -- pretending to be from Fidelity? -- but it still made me laugh out loud:Dear,I am Murphy Joe, Funds Manager of Fidelity Investment...
According to the WSJ, Microsoft is in talks with Facebook about making an investment putting a valueof $10-billion on the social-networking site. Yowza. This sort of thing has, of course, been tipped for some time. Microsoft has bought Facebook five...
While in New York last week I had a brief visit with the my friend Bill (ex- of CNBC) and the rest of the folks at TheStreet.com. That resulted in me wandering around on lower Wall Street with TheStreet's most...
I'm sure this implies absolutely nothing whatsoever in terms of a bubble-ish sort of thing going on in hedge and private equity:Almost half of the newcomers to the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans made their fortune in hedge...
I'm traveling again this week. First briefly to Chicago, and then to Ottawa, Canada. Back to San Diego later in the week. Position yourself as appropriate, of course, in S&P Futures....
Interesting figure from a new Celent report showing that the best place to trade Nasdaq stocks isn't always Nasdaq. Not surprising news, per se, but interesting to anyone coming for the first time to the rapidly bifurcating world of listing...
There is an eye-opening statistic on the credit crunch in a report last week from Greenwich Associates:"In perhaps the clearest indication of the severity and extent of the liquidity disruption, more than 60% of participants active in corporate bonds say...
Crushingly disappointing, no doubt, to market efficiency sorts, there are still more $20-bills lying on the statistical arbitrage sidewalk:The Statistics of Statistical ArbitrageFinancial Analysts JournalRobert Fernholz and Cary Maguire, Jr.September/October 2007, Vol. 63, No. 5: 46-52(doi: 10.2469/faj.v63.n5.4839)AbstractHedge funds sometimes use...
One of the many troubles with RSS readers is they have the bad habit of catching and remembering early drafts of your posts. Case in point, a post at economist Greg Mankiw's blog. Three rapid-fire successive versions of a post...
Missed this until now, but Alan Greenspan's appearance on the Daily Show is among the more unsettling moments in Greenpan-ish history:...
Entertainingly contradictory musings from billionaire (and new VC) Randal Kirk on the venture capital business:If you like something, you should want more of it, and if you don't like it, you should get rid of it. [His company] never traded...
From Terry Keenan's column in the NY Post:Even Barbara Walters poked fun at her old boyfriend, scoffing at Al's real estate record on "The View" this week. Walters recounted how Greenspan convinced her not to buy a Fifth Avenue apartment...
From the Financial Times, a fairly remarkable concession from ex- Fed chair Alan Greenspan:`The presumption that we were fully independent and have full discretion was false,'' Greenspan said in an interview published by the newspaper on Sept. 16. Raising rates...
Lots of currency stories in the weekend papers, which must mark some sort of near-term trough for the tumbling U.S. currency. Nevertheless, this figure from the NY Times is interesting, showing that the dollar is, in trade-weighted terms, touching its...
A little over thirty years ago -- Friday, November 26th, 1976, to be specific -- Gerald Ford was in the White House, Pierre Trudeau was on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, and the U.S. and the Canadian dollar were at parity....
Sorry folks, posting's been slow. I'm still in New York, taping some things, plus doing some Money:Tech related work. Will have more to say shortly. Trust me, it will be lots of fun....
I need to fly more in India and Korea. Carriers from those two countries lead the world in in-flight entertainment. Who knew?Jet bags international award for best inflight entertainment19 Sep, 2007MUMBAI: India's largest private air carrier Jet Airways has been...
Okay, time to play the equity analyst home game. Rank the following factors in terms of their importance (from a statistical point of view) in dictating whether, and how many, equity analysts follow a stock. PE ratioPrice-earnings growth ratio (PEG)Average...
The Fed rate cut quote du jour goes to the WSJ's MarketBeat blog:Lehman Brothers probably could have reported that it was shutting down operations and moving to Kazakhstan and the Fed move would have still inspired a rally.[via WSJ]...
Ben and those kids at the Fed are tricksy critters. They had us all convinced that a quarter-point Fed rate cut was coming ... and then wham, they unanimously vote to drop a half-point cut on the market. Critics are...
Not a big surprise that some hedge funds are becoming increasingly aggressive about putting observers into courtrooms, but still interesting:Litigators have often been called in to evaluate the investment impact of a patent conflict during the course of due diligence...
Here are twinned housing market quotes du jour:"[A collapse in Spanish housing] is completely out of the question. We have the good fortune to have one of the most efficient financial systems in the world."Source: David Tagues, Spanish Prime Minister's...
Tiernan at TTD has a good summary of some Rupert Murdoch comments at a Goldman Sachs conference today. Among other things, he more or less concedes that making the WSJ free is a done deal. He goes on, however, to...
Leaving aside whether this setup could ever be useful,here is the kind of photo that gets we ADD sufferers into full vibrate-like-a-tuning-fork mode. From Bloomberg, it's fund manager Adam Sender ensconced in information. The screens! The screens!...
There is lots of interesting research around hedge funds and social networks, including how many funds in similar geographies unexpectedly end up in similar stocks. But that kind of social network isn't what interests the SEC of late, it's another...
Europe is having its own iPhone frenzy tonight, with pundits buzzing about the announcement on Tuesday of Apple's European iPhone pricing and partners. Leaving aside for a moment how the product will do -- okay, I remain confident it will...
There is some big email news tonight. No, not that news, but this news. My friend David Ascher is leaping out of ActiveState and going to head up MailCo, a sister company to Mozilla tasked with taking email to the...
Leaving aside the Facebook aspect -- which is admittedly hard, given that is its raison-d'etre -- I'm kinda fond of the new fbFund launched by Facebook, in conjunction with Accel and Founders Fund.First, the gist: It's a $10m grants-only fund...
Here is the key feature for a Blackberry-killer. And it's not a touch screen, nor a better browser, nor even WiFi or faster network speeds. All of those would be nice, but they pale in desirability against eliminating the teeth-grindingly...
This is admittedly a sample size of 1, but I was almost in the Apple store here in La Jolla on the weekend. I say "almost" because I walked in the door with my son to have a quick look...
Nice Flex-based realtime(-ish) stock ticker demo from the folks at Lightstreamer. Nifty, but wish it had real stocks....
I'm in midtown Manhattan later this week, with some time on Thursday morning to grab coffee, etc. If a few people would like to ante with some interesting conversation, or a Money:Tech-related demo, or whatever, send me an email and...
Apparently doing component teardowns of Apple's new iPod Nano are tougher than expected:For some devices, like the iPhone and the iPod series, iSuppli employs another company to expertly apply acid to get at components. "Sometimes even that doesn't work," said...
One of the joys of being in San Diego is a steady stream of major local conferences, some of which look like just too much fun to miss. Today's pick, this one: 2007 Home Equity Lending ConferenceSeptember 23 - 25,...
Given the current strategic shift at Brightcove from tool/destination to pure tool, and the $85-million in Brightcove investment from increasingly antsy investors, how much longer can it be until the video service gets bought? With its high quality and its...
Anyone have a decent ongoing source of industry-wide MBA placement rates, ideally including historical figures? Lots of individual schools publish figures, but I can't find a central storehouse....
Whoa, the NY Times called a double market-top today on both private equity (okay, that was over a while ago), and hedge funds. Not that either are going away, of course -- both are large and permanent fixtures in the...
Sometimes a picture is worth 150 blog words. News this past Friday that Northern Rock -- one of the U.K.'s biggest mortgage lenders -- had received rescue funding from the Bank of England had many of its customers queueing up...
As I'm working away preparing for the Money:Tech conference early next year (and feel free to keep sending all those great ideas), I've been thinking a lot about the nature of technology as it's used by Wall Street. Here is...
I'm buried today. Totally. Appreciate the notes about my absence, but no injuries or kidnapping -- just overloaded with work....
Okay, it was fun kicking quantitative investors -- "quants" -- for a while, but it's getting tiresome. For starters, quants aren't at all monolithic, so the whole category is a bit meaningless. Second, many of those tarred back in August...
If Matt Drudge didn't exist, would the online media ecosystem have had to create him? As the following chart of most-trafficked news sites shows, it is remarkable the key role he continues to play....
Important viewing: Are America's rich falling behind the super-rich?In The Know: Are America's Rich Falling Behind The Super-Rich?[via Big Picture]...
It's nice, sunny day, and in flying back to San Diego today I tried to reschedule on Alaska Airlines, only to be told by them "Don't. Not on days like this." I tried to puzzle that through, thinking it's clear,...
I may have told this story here before, but I'll tell it here again. (Hey, it's my blog; I get to repeat myself at will.)Eons ago during my grad school program in business I took a course in logic. There...
My friend Herb argued in a recent column -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- that "debt is high and the end is nigh". I cordially disagreed with him on CNBC during one of our twice-weekly on-air visits, in part because...
A story in tonight's WSJ has economists upping the likelihood of a U.S. recession in 2008. Three-quarters of the 52 economists surveyed put the odds at or above 30%, but the range was gigantic from 5% to 90%. I put...
A few quick things to empty my browser tabs:I pop up in the NY Times today in an article about the next generation of online social sitesThe Ticker Game is good funJeff Matthew argues that iPhone sales running at half...
There has always been a cottage industry in blaming ex- Fed chief Alan Greenspan for all things economic. With his new book coming out, expect that to grow much larger as he becomes the fall guy for the current credit...
A comment here reminded me that I hadn't updated in some time my frivolous use of Google Trends to check the real estate bubble. Recall, a year ago I posted the top normalized cities for Google searches for "real estate...
The latest data from TNS Media Intelligence shows how U.S. advertising spending in the first half is heading into a downturn -- except for online spending, which remains up remarkably. Note, of course, that these results do not include search...
In reading a WSJ piece about rising passenger-caused disruptions on commercial airplanes, my main reaction was that this is all about alcohol. While I hate to punish everyone for the sins of a few, how much longer can it be...
My language usage nit of the day is about the phrase "flushed out". Here is an example from today's WSJ in an interview with an Apple fan who has not yet bought an iPhone:Mr. Clark says he fell in love...
It turns out that higher gas prices may have one positive side-effect. According to research from a doctoral dissertation by someone at Washington University in St. Louis, higher gas prices leads to less U.S. obesity. $1 in real gasoline prices...
Well, I sure nailed that. Back when Harvard Management Co. CEO Mohamed El-Erian was named head of that multi-billion-dollar endowment fund I gave him eighteen months before he was gone. Instead, he lasted twenty months, or about two months longer...
Interesting upcoming Journal of Finance paper on the market for stock shorting:Supply and Demand Shifts in the Shorting MarketAuthors: COHEN, LAUREN; DIETHER, KARL B.; MALLOY, CHRISTOPHER J.Using proprietary data on stock loan fees and quantities from a large institutional investor,...
Alison, I know this world is killing you.Oh, Alison, my aim is true.My aim is true. - "Alison", by Elvis Costello, from My Aim is True (1977)The story among VCs about the London-based AIM Exchange for a few years...
Some quick links to empty my ever-overflowing link box: Airline flights less turbulent because of new turbulence analysis software (EETimes)Pension funds' liabilities grew about 2.0% in August (Mellon)Post-price-cut iPhone sales are reportedly up 300% (Piper Jaffray via B2)The strange and...
This morning I got to pondering as I was scanning Institutional Investor magazine's list of the top banking firms for analyst research in structured securities. Those analysts, of course, are the folks that opine on current powder kegs like asset-backed...
To the following list of dumb headlines ...Something Went Wrong in Plane CrashExpert Says Cold Wave Linked to TemperaturesCan Bono Save the World?add this recent headline ....Credibility of financial blogs is questionable...
Nice analysis from Raymond James chief economist Jeff Saut on some important differences between the current and past housing cycles. In particular, we are seeing rising inventories in the current bust, which is very different from what happened after the...
Fascinating stuff in the latest release from Nielsen's/NetRatings with respect to traffic to the most-visited financial websites. Yahoo Finance remains well out in front, and Google, while moving up somewhat, is still a vanishingly small percentage of total category traffic....
From the some-stories-write-themselves file, the recent revelation that hijacked PCs insider Pfizer's own corporate network are part of a botnet sending out spam for the company's much-spammed Viagra product:Computers inside pharmaceutical giant Pfizer's network are spamming the internet with e-mails...
My general uneasiness about most so-called Web 2.0 companies gets trumped tonight by news that Weather Channel is buying Weather Bonk, a Web 2.0-ish weather news/data site. We weather geeks love anything involving the weather, and so anyone making money...
A quick note that that this site and a summary of some of my musings appeared in this weekend's Barron's. The article, by the estimable Eric Savitz, was on subprime and tech stocks....
According to Reuters' website, it will no longer offer the free version -- or any, for that matter -- of its excellent PowerScreener tool as of October 4, 2007. Having launched a bevy of for-pay versions of the stock screener...
Some quick links to empty my ever-overflowing link box:Bandwidth demand in video-mad Japan is "only" growing at 20% a year (Andrew Nyquist)Many (but not all) quants have bounced back from a miserable August (FT)Hurricane scientists are like economists: they have...
You know, I need to invest in more companies that sell to ski resorts. I got to thinking the preceding this morning on the news that Vail has partnered with SkyeTek to provide RFID technology for automated lift pass scanning...
On the news this morning that billionaire Joe Lewis is buying 7% of brokerage firms Bear Stearns, most people's reaction will be a variant on something like "Who?". The Telegraph of London has a nice bluffer's overview of the 70-year-old...
Apple founder Steve Wozniak is off-message with respect to the rationale for Apple's iPhone price cut:Stephen Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, told The IBC Daily that he thinks Apple's decision to drop the price of the iPhone by up to...
Peter Thiel of Clarium Capital (and the Founders' Fund) has an entertainingly different and unusual view of the markets:...[Peter] Thiel described "a world full of massive manias, booms and busts on a scale unprecedented in all of history." Sound familiar?...
Good figure from a new Bank of International Settlement report. It shows subprime delinquency rates by year, and the widening spreads across bond ratings. For those of you just tuning into the credit entertainment now, note how tights the spreads...
Growing up long-ago in Canadian cottage country we had a supposedly untippable canoe. It had these styrofoam runners down each side, put in place to keep the thing from flipping, even if you leaned waaaay over. At least in theory....
According to a Kevin Delaney story in Monday's WSJ, the 100-day overhaul at Yahoo is going to result in ... more of the same. He says people are telling him a "major overhaul" is unlikely, and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang...
From a presentation I was browsing through tonight, here is brokerage firm Bear Stearns' reading list for new interns. All in all, it's solid if fairly predictable stuff. So, what would you add to the list? What would you take...
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet.com. Ace Fed watcher says Fed will cut rates to 5% and stop (Bloomberg) The ever-bearish Jeremy Grantham is more bearish than usual (Fortune)...
Missed this until now, but all papers are now online for the recent KC Fed Jackson Hole meeting on housing and housing finance. As an aside, I see that they have finally obfuscated (at least a little) the URL, making...
Lots of good stuff in the collected correspondence (including rejection notices) from publisher Alfred Knopf. (Although, why can't it be online and indexed?). Here's one:[A Knopf reviewer] passed on George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,†explaining it was “impossible to sell animal...
Harrowing article on why mapping is newly requiring rapid changes to keep with a world in flux from changing coastlines, shrinking lakes, disappearing glaciers, etc. Below, for example, see the Aral Sea's changes on maps over the last 40 years:...
Great figure from the Times yesterday on the boom and semi-bust in people taking the California real estate exam. There are sure going to be a lot of ex-real estate agents out there....
After all the recent market downturns coinciding with my travel, my friend Dan sent me the following bit of very funny Python stock trading code tonight. It ties its recommendations strategy to my current whereabouts. (Note that Dopplr is a...
I hardly know what say given Osama bin Laden's economic pitch for America today:"[I sympathize with] the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes...""To conclude,"...
Piece deleted. Your over-worked editor didn't notice that somehow an article from 2005 snuck into his supposedly live newsfeed. Sorry about that, but thanks for all the amusing emails about it....
I love when market participants and commentators start into the "a rate cut won't work" litany. It's happening now in certain quarters, with the usual nattering about the Federal Reserve "pushing on a rope", etc. Last time I heard it...
Okay, this whole Apple iPhone price-cut issue continues to spiral. The stock is now off 9% since the news, and it's falling more today as analysts incorporate the earnings impact of the $100 in-store credit into their models. It's not...
From the Some Stories Write Themselves file, a headline straight off the wire moments ago:Ex-Enron CEO Skilling Files Appeal, Demands New Trial - CNBCApparently it was the other Jeff Skilling at Enron that did it....
Interesting comments from Tracey Scheppach of Starcom USA on how the "long tail" isn't that long:...one lesson that I have learned from TiVo is when a consumer has control over what they want to watch and when, the long tail...
Some useful price-cutting context via the NY Times on the unexpected $200 iPhone price cut yesterday:Motorola, for instance, introduced the ultrathin Razr phone for $499 with a two-year service contract in early 2005. Six months later, Motorola realized it had...
Entertaining note from Steve Jobs to iPhone buyers on the price cut issue. Two issues: First, he had to do it; and second, in reading many AAPL analyst reports this morning, most (but not all) were more sanguine about the...
A geekish digression: I've been trying to write an XPath expression to exploit a new feature in Google Spreadsheets whereby you can extract live content from other sites. I want to pull the next quarterly earnings date for public companies...
I've been arguing for some time that tech was going to be strong since the subprime meltdown. The main arguments: minimal subprime/credit exposure, major exporters, and minimal consumer exposure. And that thesis has been playing out, with tech being a...
Funny, deeply tongue-in-cheek column on subprime by writer Michael Lewis at Bloomberg. He role-plays a hedge fund manager blow up by the mortgage meltdown:So right after the Bear Stearns funds blew up, I had a thought: This is what happens...
I'm as interested as ever in realtime and live media, especially web-enabled. I complained a little today on a related subject, with the absence of the macrumorslive site making the Apple event today a little less fun. I got to...
An email from the Financial Times tonight touting the top stories in tomorrow's paper contains a somewhat surreal typo. A paragraph summarizing a Richard Waters piece about Silicon Valley's conference season, and in particular about Mike's upcoming TechCrunch40 conference, concludes...
Gizmodo caught a fascinating verbal slip from Steve Jobs. He just referred to the recently-launched iPhone as the "old iPhone". Whoa, combined with the $200 price cut, that was a fast trip to obsolescence.Now, the iPod Nano. People have said...
Lots of live coverage everywhere of today's AAPL product launch event -- new iPods, etc. -- but in the absence of macrumorslive I'm sticking with EngadgetGizmodo for now. As a fun aside, I'm hoping to have a nifty live video...
Some snarky stories write themselves straight from the headline:Countrywide Names Chief Risk Officer[via SmartMoney]...
You have to hand it to columnist Michael Wolff. My fellow CNBC contributor (and infrequent on-air combatant) has turned his current widely-read Vanity Fair column into a link-included musing on his own new business venture, a news site called Newser....
Much of investing is a search for hard-to-get data that can give you an edge, or alpha. That quest for alpha via better data is one of the themes of my Money:Tech 2008 conference, and it is the topic of...
Got a nice note the other day from Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief at Wired and author of some obscure book you may have heard of called The Long Tail. Chris wrote me about my recently-announced Money:Tech 2008 financial technology event next February in...
You have to hand it to the hedge fund community. Funds are already emerging to take advantage of the collapse of the quants this past August:New York-based Amida Capital plans a one-year fund “to capitalise on near-term opportunities caused by...
Maybe this happened ages ago, but I just noticed that the venture guys at Kleiner Perkins have revamped their website to have the main thing on the front page be a search box. It's definitely different, but it's also more...
It says something that I read a review for some interesting-looking software from a newly venture-backed company -- MeetingSense 2.0, a nifty-sounding tool for making meetings more productive -- and my first reaction is, "Ick, you have to install it?"...
Virgin Airlines has launched in-flight flirting via seat-to-seat instant messaging, and an embedded WSJ reporter provides video documentation of what it has unleashed: Stuff like "11F rocks, man!", and "23E enroute to restroom". Oh. My. God. Mind you, by the...
Pardon the geek-ish digression, but I just discovered something highly useful. While I constantly use Firefox's built-in search bar, I generally mouse my way there, which is irritating for a keyboard-fetishist like me. What's more, once there I never use...
I have conflicts of interest stretching out as far as the eye can see on this subject, but the following nugget on CNBC vs. Bloomberg TV is interesting:But from 5a-9a ET, when Bloomberg is aired on "E! Entertainment Television, "the...
It is less well known than it should be, but many large, public companies are sitting on treasure troves of generic domain names. For example, American Express has open.com; and AOL has when.com, games.com, and love.com. Are these domain names...
Apropos of all the current chatter about collapsing credit markets, it's entertaining to see that one of the two investment banks most exposed to subprime is already revisiting a prior credit crisis. Investment bank Lehman Brothers is recruiting staff to...
Before digressing to flog his Case-Shiller housing index, Yale economist Robert Shiller makes some fair points in the following video interview with Bloomberg. Among other things, the Fed conference in Jackson Hole the last few days has had a timely...
It's nice that the annual Kansas City Fed economic conference is in Jackson, Wyoming. Lovely place, gorgeous views of the Tetons, and it's where Fed officials have for the last few days been able to talk talk deep thoughts about...
In a speech at the Jackson Hole economic conference this weekend, Bundesbank president Axel Weber did a nice put of putting into words what is really going in financial markets. Call it the first "non-bank bank run". The current turmoil...
<musing>It's easy to cite the more obvious non-housing sectors being hurt by the subprime collapse. For example, there is pleasure boats, automobiles, big box electronics, etc. But what aren't places like P.F. Chang's named more often? I like to think...
Here is the housing stat du jour:Between November 2001 and April 2005, housing and housing-related industries created 788,300 jobs, or 40 percent of the total created in the United States, according to Asha Bangalore, an economist at Northern Trust in...
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet.com: U.S. at risk of housing-induced recession, says economist Martin Feldstein (Reuters) How the mortgage crisis is slaying an entire town (NY Times) Google...
