February 13, 2009
While Richard Florida -- author of The Rise of the Creative Class, among other books -- is a controversial fellow among some of my friends and colleagues, his new piece in The Atlantic is worth reading. Essentially Florida argues the...
If this is Friday, it must be time for the FDIC to update its list of failed banks. For the third week running The FDIC has taken down threefour banks, bringing the total so far this year to twelvethirteen. To...
Loved this cautionary (ahem) Bloomberg screen grab from earlier today: [via FT Alphaville]...
Impressive upswing in this past week’s junk bond issuance, with a mad scramble to get deals done in a slightly more willing market. Mind you, the spreads were large, so it demonstrates how badly the capital was needed: High-yield, high-risk...
For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, revenue was $481.1 million compared to $1.2 billion for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008, a decrease of 60 percent. [Emphasis mine] -- Nvidia press release (02/10/09)...
This strange story is blackly comedic in these otherwise unhappy economic times: The [British Antarctic Survey] said it had never known a response like the one that followed its appeal for 38 new staff. …Linda Capper, from the Cambridge-based organisation,...
Meant to post this yesterday, but finally getting to it. Port of Long Beach container traffic was doing 23% y-o-y in January....
The bubble in TBT (AI) Graphics chip market goes all air pocket-ish in Q4 ‘08 (Peddie) More skepticism about future of BofA and Citi (CNBC) Morgan Stanley suspends top real estate official (FT) When do sovereigns overweight selves in...
Some random and entirely anecdotal street-level economic factoids: My dentist’s office is crazy busy. It is, an assistant says, mostly people worried about the economy and so getting all their dental work done right now. PF Chang’s CEO said in...
Credit default swaps are somwhere between magic eight balls and weekend football betting lines in terms of predictive accuracy, but there is no denying that they are currently auguring a bad credit fortnight for Ireland. The CDS spreads have widened...
This is such an interesting story, which is why I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more play: A German sovereign bond auction failed yesterday amid growing danger signs for governments as they attempt to raise record amounts of debt to pay...
On a semi-regular basis I like to repost this graph of global cross-currency rates for some major currencies post-Lehman. After tightening up late last year, relative spreads have widened out again considerably, with the pound leading the way down....
