February 7, 2009
Great animation from 26 Variable of the S&P 100 over the last year. The bubble color is sector, and be sure to make the Y-axis annual change and the X-axis weekly change. Fascinating watching all the balls fall into the...
John Carney has a great "two cows" explanation of Wall Street's goofy transactions and vaporous balance sheets: You have two cows. John Paulson borrows one cow so he can sell it for $100. He gives you $10 as collateral. You...
Read the following NYT piece on Japan's stimulus. its muddle-headedness about whether a decade of heavy stimulus spending was good for the country pretty much captures the confused nature of economic "thinking" (I use the word advisedly) on the issue....
Good piece in the NYT tonight that reiterates what a dopey, rushed deal BofA made for Merrill last September. If you've been paying attention it won't tell you much that you don't already know, but it's a good reminder that...
Apparently Paul Volcker and Larry Summers are already not seeing eye-to-eye on economic issues in the Obama administration. Given the choice between the two, I'd take Volcker, so this is not good news. After all, given enough provocation the blunt...
Apparently I shouldn't have given that Bugatti of mine to public radio for a tax deduction: A Bugatti sports car that was found after 50 years gathering dust in a garage in England sold last night in Paris for 3.5...
Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein thinks we could create a bunch of jobs giving Congress individualized economics training: Equally specious is the oft-heard complaint that even some of the immediate spending is not stimulative. "This is not a stimulus plan,...
As the largest municipal bankruptcy since Orange County in 1994, Vallejo, California, remains worth watching. It filed for bankruptcy last May, and it is steadily renegotiating labor contracts with its unions, and then it plans to move on to debtholders....
Ray Dalio of Bridgewater has done a better job than almost anyone of describing the current debt deleveraging process, and how it will play out. This weekend Barron’s contains a lengthy interview with Dalio, and it is a must-read...
