February 16, 2009
Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D.) tried out some econo-apocalyptic rhetoric of his own last night, saying "This state is days away from a financial collapse". That bond-friendly comment, ahem, came during the heated debate over how California can...
Greg "Farewell to Alms" Clark thinks that the days of $500,000 academic economists are over. (You knew those existed, right? Well, they do, as mad as it might seem.) The prior salary moonshot was partly a function of increased demand...
Buried in a story about Suez Canal traffic hitting five-year lows on economic weakness was a semi-amusing nugget: Suez Canal traffic in January hit its lowest level in five years because of the global financial crisis and boats taking other...
Greg Neuman of GFC Economics argues in his latest newsletter that Latvia is the first country in the world to fall into depression: A depression is usually defined as a contraction in GDP of 10% or more from peak to...
Bank solvency and the "Geithner Plan" (Bronte Capital) Death of corporate bonds (Bloomberg) Every Consensus Must End (The Baseline Scenario) A Cyclical Look at P/E Ratios (The Big Picture) Job Fears Sink Consumer Confidence to Single Digits (MC) Russian...
Interesting econo-political discussion sparked by Russ Douthat writing on "liberaltarianism" at The Atlantic. Here is Arnold Kling: To put it another way, I see a difference between Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin. To the average lefty, both of them are...
The week before last at the TED conference in Long Beach, California, Barry Schwartz gave a useful talk on the need for a return to "practical wisdom"....
Good piece tonight from Michael Pettis arguing that the China must continue revaluing its currency, and strongly resist devaluation, despite evidence its trading partners are doing just that. Anything else would lead to protests that China is not competing fairly,...
This graph incorporating Japan's just-released Q4 GDP figures -- -3.3%, or a 12.7 percent annualized figure -- puts the lie to any dead-enders still determined arguing that the current recession a) isn't global, and b) isn't even worse elsewhere. [via...
Here is an idle ad spending nugget: Wal-mart, a notoriously miserly ad spender, is on a quest for recession-era market share gains. If it upped its ad spending as a percentage of sales to the level spent by Target (2%...
While there is lots of talk about U.S. bank failures, and about how far more banks failed during the S&L crisis of the 1980s than have failed so far during the credit crisis, there is another way of looking at...
Reading as President Obama talk himself into and out of bank nationalization makes you think we should all be charging for some sort of economic psychoanalysis. The following quotes are from a small press gaggle on Friday. Read it in...
