Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

• Obama, lawmakers fall short on debt deal – http://t.co/MK34wyh ->
• It makes me happy when CIA does even weirder things than I thought it did. A fake vaccine program? You go, spooks. http://slate.me/qqOKm9 ->
• How to evaluate new and wacky research claims, or, the re-return of Dennis the Dentist – http://bit.ly/pY4fmX ->
• Waldman: The IPO process offers issuers, underwriters, and favored investors too much and the rest of us too little. http://bit.ly/l2eRMZ ->
• Photo set: World War II — The Battle of Britain – http://bit.ly/nL78HU ->

Robbie Naish surfing one of the longest waves in the world, at Pavones, Costa Rica. 2m15s ride, and 1.09 km. Epic.

New FRBSF paper:

Gauging the Impact of the Great Recession

The Great Recession of 2007-2009, coming on the heels of a spending binge fueled by a housing bubble, so far has resulted in over $7,300 in foregone consumption per person, or about $175 per person per month. The recession has had many costs, including negative impacts on labor and housing markets, and lost government tax revenues. The extensive harm of this episode raises the question of whether policymakers could have done more to avoid the crisis.

via FRBSF Economic Letter: Gauging the Impact of the Great Recession (2011-21, 7/11/2011).

Amazon is a lovely company, but its California retail sales tax position is indefensible.

Amazon said Monday that it would back a California ballot initiative that would roll back a new state law that forces more online retailers to collect sales tax.

via Amazon Backs End to Online Sales Tax in California – NYTimes.com.

Before:

Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) may begin one of its largest workforce reductions in August by eliminating about 5000 jobs.

After:

Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), the largest networking-equipment company, may cut as many as 10,000 jobs, or about 14 percent of its workforce, to revive profit growth, according to two people familiar with the plan.

I’m so sad. I really liked the implied calendar bucketing in the first (bad) lede.

I love pretty much everything about this 1906 San Francisco footage. The pace is wonderfully glacial.

From an FT column tonight by George Soros:

As integration has turned into disintegration, Europe’s political establishment has also switched from spearheading further unification to defending the status quo. Now, anyone who finds the status quo undesirable, unacceptable or unsustainable must take an anti-European stance. As heavily indebted countries are pushed towards insolvency, the number of the disaffected grows, together with support for anti-European parties such as True Finns in Finland.

Yet Europe’s establishment still argues there is no alternative. Financial authorities resort to ever more desperate measures to buy time. But time is working against them. Greece is heading towards disorderly default and/or devaluation, with incalculable consequences.

via Europe need not slide into disintegration – FT.com.

Not to take anything away from the ongoing drought, but this seems a natural calendar spread trade on cattle/beef prices. Sadly, however, the COW ETN is illiquid and has mammoth bid/ask spreads.

“One of the biggest impacts of the drought is going to be the shrinking of the cattle herd in the United States,” said Bruce A. Babcock, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University in Ames. And that will have a paradoxical but profound impact on the price of a steak.

Ranchers whose grass was killed by drought cannot afford to sustain cattle with hay or other feed, which is also climbing in price. Their response will most likely be to send animals to slaughter early. That glut of beef would lower prices temporarily.

But America’s cattle supply will ultimately be lower at a time when the global supply is already low, potentially resulting in much higher prices in the future.

via Drought Spreads Its Pain Across 14 States – NYTimes.com.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

— Michael Crichton

via Quote by Michael Crichton: “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as…”.