February 12, 2009
All of these accidents involving President Obama's various Cabinet nominees -- taxes, muni bond issues, withdrawals, changes of heart, etc. -- put me in mind of a political version of Spinal Tap....
This excerpt from a Chris Wood report ends awfully controversially: Nationalization of the bust banks and separation of good assets from bad assets is the only honest way forward, politically, for dealing with the current escalating mess in the American...
From the just-released BTS November air traffic data, this graph of year-over-year monthly changes in domestic air passenger revenue-miles is fairly eye-opening. The industry is in its worst downturn since 9/11, with domestic RPM off 14.3% in November alone. Mind...
This story is almost beyond belief, but I suppose nothing really is anymore. The gist: An $8.5-billion investment firm has been offering certificates of deposit with anomalously high rates of return for more than a dozen years, and concerns are...
The result, with net Chinese consumption contracting by more than net Chinese production, is that non-Chinese producers must absorb more than 100% of the contraction in demand from non-Chinese consumers. It will be hard to convince them that this...
My book of the week is an easy one this time around: It's Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, by Robert Shiller and George Akerlof. I get sent a lot...
The latest issue of the U.K.'s left-leaning New Statesman calls out the current economic downturn in a bit of pessimism porn called "The New Depression". The cover essay by Martin Jacques is worth reading, but keep in mind the author...
Secret EU document says full-scale bank bailout could send EU into crisis (Telegraph) China to stick with US bonds -- even if it is not happy about it (FT) Bank Stress Test May Expand Regulators’ Role (NYTimes) The rise...
If you haven't read it, Irving Fisher's classic 1933 paper from Econometrica containing his debt-deflation theory of depressions is definitely worth a close look. The parallels to the current situation remain wide and important, as I buzz-killingly persist in pointing...
There has been lots of chatter about Harvard Management letting go a significant chunk of its staff, as well as winding down much of its equity portfolio, as a filing this week showed. I thought it would be interesting to...
And you thought Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was being unsubtle in accusing China of currency manipulation: We hate you guys. Once you start issuing $1 trillion-$2 trillion [$1,000bn-$2,000bn] …we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you...
