Economics
Hi, Tom Vanderwell here with another of my Mortgage Market Week in Review guest posts. Thanks to Paul for giving me the privilege of putting it here.....Well, it's Friday again, everyone is back in school, my 18 year old...
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Well, here we are on Friday again and I'm trying to figure out how to summarize all that's been happening in the mortgage and financial worlds. I could write a book about it, but I won't (at least not today....)...
Full marks for eBay entrepreneurs for stepping in where forex traders have lost count of the zeros being added to the Zim dollar every few days. How about paying US$83 for the new Z$100 billion bank note! Although the novelty value of the Zim note is surging, the sad truth is that the note is not worth enough to buy a loaf of bread.
The Top 7 things Every Home Buyer Should Know
Once again, Tom Vanderwell here with some thoughts about moral hazard....Barry Ritholz at The Big Picture had these two comics that brought to the forefront again the issue of moral hazard. Check out the comics and then we'll talk "on...
Tom Vanderwell here, and I'm taking the liberty of reposting my Mortgage Market Week in Review that normally appears at my blog at www.straighttalkaboutmortgages.com. I'll have more thoughts about the mortgage world next week and thanks to Paul for...
I’m expecting a flood of these stories over the coming months, but at least in this first go-around the anecdotes about how difficult the housing market has become in some major urban areas are fresh and cautionary: Massachusetts home sales...
You want to know what really gets an economics Nobel Prize winner excited? Find out in this clip from the San Diego U-T today: Nobel Deeds San Diego Union-TribuneDiane Bell, Nov. 8 UCSD economist Clive Granger is delighted at his run...
There is a good (and lengthy) interview with Stanford economist Michael Boskin in today's SF Chronicle. As the go-to guy for Republicans at the highest levels (and occasionally Democrats too), the piece is worth reading for the perspective (and occasional...
There is a scary scenario being sketched out by meteorologists watching Hurrican Rita: The hurricane could stall once it makes landfall, perhaps even going into slow reverse, like some slow-moving runaway bulldozer: NO CHANGES ON TRACK. LANDFALL NEAR GLS, THEN...
In an interview with CFO Magazine, Greg Mankiw makes some pleasingly frank comments:On stock options...On the stock-options issue, were you surprised that expensing was delayed again?I'm of the view that eventually stock options should be expensed. But to me the...
There is a fascinating new "small world" study out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It looks at small world phenomena in the context of global air transportation i.e, which cities are most central, and which cities...
The trouble with thinking in long tail terms is that you can't stop thinking in long tail terms. After a while, pretty much everything you see looks like a long tail, even it's really just commonplace power laws, Zipf distributions,...
As usual, the WSJ has a nice graphical comparison of the last two Fed policy statements:...
While the following makes a certain twisted logical sense, it is wonderfully perverse:Overwhelmed by more than $60,000 in debt, Lenya Garcia filed for bankruptcy protection last July. In January, her case was completed and her debts -- mostly on credit...
Michael Marks of Flextronics has some provocative views on the future of the semiconductor industry. While manufacturing has already largely moved offshore, he is arguing design is set to follow -- with much higher cost savings:Q: What will be the...
It has long been accepted wisdom that one of the ways Silicon Valley differs from other parts of the country is that people move from company-to-company more. The result, of course, should be more diffusion of knowledge and innovations, with...
There is a worth-reading Paul Krugman piece in the current New York Review of Books. While it is nominally a review of Kotlikoff & Burns book "The Coming Generational Storm", he devotes most of the piece to a reasonably successful...
The trouble with economics is that many things that work in practice don't work in theory (and vice-versa, of course). That is why it is entertaining to read a recent analysis of Michael Lewis's "moneyball" theory, which seemingly worked so...
Fascinating article in the current Bloomberg Markets magazine on India's next frontier in outsourcing: surgery. Health care for foreign patients will deliver 100 billion rupees ($2.3 billion) a year to India's hospitals by 2012, according to a report by New...
The following infographic comes from today's San Diego U-T. While the U-T uses it to argue that coastal California is over-priced and people are no longer moving in, you might equally argue that it shows how coastal California is either...
The Federal Reserve is on a real transparency kick, as evidenced by its recent move to speedily release ill-edited transcripts of its December deliberations. Now, however, we have Fed Governor Donald Kohn saying in weekend comments that the Fed is...
Reed-Elsevier's ScienceDirect has joined the WSJ, NY Times, FT, and Yahoo in revealing a live list of the most popular artices there. In the case of ScienceDirect, it is broken down by domain area, from Agriculture, through Computer Science, to...
I've clearly gone wrong somewhere. Despite umpteen gazillion media appearances, more OpEds than I care to be reminded of, a relatively non-soporific speaking style, and a generally sunny demeanour, I don't get overly large speaking fees, nor am I overwhelmed...
Three provocative pieces in this weekend's money-oriented edition of the N.Y. Times magazine:Paul Krugman argues Alan Greenspan's legacy will be "aid & comfort" to a fiscally irresponsible administration Michael Lewis on the "joys" of investing in socially responsible companies Bill...
In the comments to my earlier post on this whole Six Apart/MT/free software affair, a reader writes that Six Apart isn't alone in turning a "free" product into a "commercial" product:As an example, look at Nick Bradbury's software. His FeedDemon...
Can you make money from selling free software? The recent community meltdown over Six Apart's decision to change license terms for its popular Movable Type content management application has many people wondering. You can, but you also have to set...
Alan Greenspan's FOMC statements are beyond parody at this point, immolating bits of prose that don't bear up to any scrutiny. Nevertheless, the WSJ has made it a practise of comparing current and past Greenspan-ian commments, and the "delta" for...
This is one of those "it's always high growth when you start from zero" examples, but it is still an interesting factoid:According to an ITU report to be released May 3rd, Africa is now the fastest-growing mobiles market in the...
The New Republic must be trying to win some sort of buzzword bingo variant in its piece this week on Greg Mankiw:Greg Mankiw is a nerd. The current chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), Mankiw is...
Monster's help-wanted numbers are now out, and here is a quick summary of how its help-wanted index compares to a similar long-standing measure from the Conference Board:...
According to a Swedish official on Talking Points (a BBC program) just now, more money is sent home every year by individual economic migrants than is sent via goverment-based international aid. Fascinating program, with people calling in from Bangalore, Boston,...
The IMF's Finance & Development quarterly has an interesting piece arguing that the U.S. consumer is in better shape than he/she might seem:"...the balance sheet of the U.S. household sector still looks robust, partly as a result of the equity...
Curmudgeonly Barron's columnist Alan Abelson follows up on Council of Economic Advisers chief Gregory Mankiw's laudatory comments about outsourcing earlier this week with a proposal:"We suspect there are legions of highly qualified economists in Bangalore or Guangdong who would leap...
According to the current Advertising Age, things were busy, if nervous, at this week's National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE -- pronounced to (sort of) rhyme with "nasty") conference in Las Vegas. TV execs can't figure out where the...
My National Post column today was on bumpf and posturing at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos.Update: Ah, if only I had seen this story before I had written the above column. Apparently the WEF anticipated my criticisms...
Microsoft's quarterly financial results tonight seemingly have many investors in a tizzy. It has nothing to do with the higher-than-expected equity compensation costs, however. Those are shuffling of costs from one period to another, and it isn't all that important...
Quirky piece in the Independent about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent marriage to romance novelist Melanie Craft. It is requisitely snide in that U.K. way, so you get bon mots like the following: "At 34, Ms Craft is 25 years...
All businesses require loss leaders. Men's suits, consumer electronics, software, and yes, academic journals -- they all need 'em. Case in point, Nature's current issue and an article therein about the best way to skip stones. While Nature does periodically...
