Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

From the Guardian:

Few landmarks sum up Ireland’s boom and bust, culminating in last week’s €85bn international bailout, more succinctly than this street, where prices have crashed by at least two-thirds. “It’s right in the centre of things; it’s a street that’s always achieved top prices,” says Peter Kenny, associate director at estate agency Colliers International. “But from the height of the market, it’s fallen a very great deal. The sharpest drop has been at the top of the market.”

More here.

Nice chart from Michael Cembalest at JP Morgan showing trough to peak changes in various instruments over the last hundred years or so.

I liked this map of the time series spread of complex mortgages shown in a recent Chicago Fed publication. Nothing like a good real estate crash to bring things to a halt:

Two-part of recent BBC Newsnight appearance of Chris Hitchens on BBC Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman. Articulate, passionate, thoughtful and important.

Typical mix of entertainingly smart/candid and tone-deaf in this Michael Eisner piece in the WSJ on technology and the future of media.

After Disney, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I found new partners. I’ve always liked being part of a team, whether it was with Barry Diller [at Paramount] or Frank Wells [at Disney] or my wife or new people—finding the Shawn Fannings [of Napster] of the world. I believe in the idea of partners. I’m not a sole practitioner. Never have been. It’s more fun having somebody else there to commiserate with and celebrate with.

I used to be the youngest person in every organization I was at. My partners were always older. And then I woke up one day and I was the oldest person and my partners were significantly younger. Now my partners are generationally younger. When I left Disney, I brought Andy Redman with me. He was 25. We’ve worked together for five years absolutely the same way I worked with Frank and Barry and others—every day talking 22 times a day. And he is 38 years younger. I like young ideas.

I’m kind of back to doing things the way I did at the beginning of my career. When I started, I was the lowest person on the 37th floor at ABC. Everything is given to the lowest person to do. Now I do it all myself with a few people to help. All of a sudden delegation is not as available to you as when you had 125,000 people working for you. And that’s good.

More here.

Lovely MIT forum with reminiscences about the history, present and future of laser technology.

U.S. share of world’s 100 tallest buildings:

• 1990: 80%
• 2012: 18%

Source: Bloomberg

• China’s skyscraper boom buoys global industry (Source)
• Japan begins to look pretty cheap (Source)
• The Problem with Men: A Look at Long-term Employment Trends (Source)
• The many apps that sync with the wondrous Dropbox (Source)

Entrepreneur, investor and PayPal-founder Peter Thiel talks about his investments, philanthropy, and about technology vs. the end of the world on BBC World Service’s “The Interview”. [-]

Peter Thiel is an internet entrepreneur and a libertarian. He wants to encourage free thinking and he thinks his business ventures demonstrate big ideas — PayPal, which he co-founded, created a way to make payments online. Facebook, which he took a big stake in, connected people around the world. Now he tells Mike Williams that his venture capital fund and philanthropy are aimed at encouraging the kind of technological innovation that the West needs to survive.

[27 minutes]

Intriguing stuff in new study of cash back impacts on credit cards:

Why Do Banks Reward Their Customers to Use Their Credit Cards?

Sumit Agarwal, Sujit Chakravorti, Anna Lunn

Using a unique administrative level dataset from a large and diverse U.S. financial institution, we test the impact of rewards on credit card spending and debt. Specifically, we study the impact of cash-back rewards on individuals before and during their enrollment in the program. We find that with an average cash-back reward of $25, spending and debt increases by $79 and $191 a month, respectively during the first quarter. Furthermore, we find that cardholders who do not use their card prior to the cash-back program increase their spending and debt more than cardholders with debt prior to the cash-back program. In addition, we find that 11 percent of cardholders that did not use their cards in the previous 3 months prior to the cash-back program spent at least $50 in the first month of the program. Finally, we find heterogeneous responses by demographic and credit constraint characteristics.