February 9, 2009
If Auric Goldfinger were around today, he'd be raiding gold ETFs, not Fort Knox: Okay, okay, that's an exaggeration -- but only slight. Fort Knox purportedly contains 4,176 metric tons of gold, which is a little more than three times...
From my continuing "euthanasia of the rentier" series on those being hard hit by declining endowment/asset income, an update on the situation at Harvard: Schools Expect Payout Decline With Corporation yet to set payout, schools brace for decrease. In response...
This has to be some sort of through-the-wormhole, here-comes-the-singularity, disturbance-in-the-force, business media event: Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb sharing buckets of air-time on CNBC today. I don't think that's happened before. Part I Part II Both men are friends of...
From the FT: Japan faces 'unimaginable' contraction Japan's economy faces an "unimaginable" contraction, the chief economist of its central bank warned on Monday, as figures revealed surging bankruptcies and a big fall in machinery orders. The warning from Kazuo Momma,...
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein gets into an argument with himself in the FT today. Consider this: In the past several months, we have heard the phrase “multiple standard deviation events” more than a few times. If events that were...
Complete diversion, but I enjoyed this 60 Minutes segment about Coldplay. Parts were laugh out loud funny, especially the idea that they attribute their success to enthusiasm and U2 "being on holiday"....
Useful chart from Bloomberg showing that short sales on the NYSE have touched an 18-year low. It is one of those paradoxical things during a declining market, of course. Now, much like with the Pelosi graph it is worth pointing...
While I maintain that the current downturn will end up being the worst since the Depression, it is worth reminding yourself what your personal recession data set is. Because there are immense availability/recency biases in play here, and they don't...
Just because people apparently won't stop sending it to me unless I post it, here is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's graph of accelerating job losses in the U.S. It's pretty, and I like the shadowing effect, but it's worth...
We are already at the 25th anniversary of the release of the classic mockumentary "This Is Spinal Tap'". To commemorate the event, Vanity Fair has done a lengthy, hilarious interview with the "band", which you can read here. A couple...
Consensus is still too optimistic on the current downturn, plus lots more (Baseline) Hayek's Nobel Prize lecture (Source) James Dyson: Let engineers make Britain great again (The Observer) Good Bank/New Bank vs. Bad Bank: a rare example of a...
The supposed commodity super cycle went from boom to bust so fast that the two pretty much blurred into one another. It was a host of things, including the fragility of the cycle, predicated, as it was, on debt and...
Good comments from a bond ghoul writing in the new Atlantic business channel on the nervousness among his compatriots given that it seems increasingly possible that bondholders will eventually be forced to share the bailout pain. As I have said...
Through some sort of strange fluke of wormhole drive-by Keynesianism I have had the following quote independently proffered to me twice in the last three days. It is usually attributed to Polish economist Michal Kalecki, but is not to be...
A textbook example has played out in U.S. corporate inventories of how hoarding in the face of moonshotting prices works really well, right up until it almost kills you: After falling sharply for a year, U.S. inventories shot up by...
Painfully amusing graphic in the NYT tonight showing that the percentage of "sell" ratings across the population of equity analysts hardly budged last year as the S&P 500 plunged. And things have changed diddly so far this year. Granted, there...
