Robert Waldmann Goldman Sachs accused of (civil) Financial Arson I don’t want to bore readers so I’ll just mention, again, that this wouldn’t have been possible if cash settlement CDS were not allowed. In all other cases it is not legal to insure against a risk that one doesn’t bear. A simple law which says […]
Lifted from an e-mail by Stormy. Another topical thread.U.S. military….massive oil shortage.I have not tracked down the original report….but there has been growing concern from a number of unusual quarters. (I discount the Oil Drum, Matt Simon, et al.) With gas usage in the states at low levels and with oil prices continuing to rise….something […]
I remain very skeptical about the sustainability of the recovery, as the labor market is in shambles and nominal wage growth is unlikely to facilitate “healthy” deleveraging – please see this recent post “Reducing household financial leverage: the easy way and the hard way”. I digress; because you can’t fight the data. And for now, […]
Barkley Rosser at Econospeak takes aim at immigration and worker ratios: Robert Reich says so, “Why More Immigrants Are An Answer to the Coming Boomer Entitlement Mess“, which is also linked to by Mark Thoma. He has been on the Social Security Advisory board and has heard all the tales of coming Demographic Doom due […]
by Bruce Webb Reader BuffPilot has been asking Angry Bear for awhile now to post the following graphhttp://blog.heritage.org/2009/03/24/bush-deficit-vs-obama-deficit-in-pictures/If you follow the link you will see that Heritage updated it with new CBO and OMB data this year. That is below the fold.http://blog.heritage.org/2010/02/05/past-deficits-vs-obamas-deficits-in-pictures/ Which I will amplify with the actual CBO Tablehttp://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10871/Chapter1.shtml I am not sure […]
March industrial production only rose 0.1%. But this is a very misleading headline asmanufacturing output rose 0.9%. The difference was a 6.4% drop in output of utilities.The decline in utilities largely reflects the March rise in temperatures and fall in heating days as the weather returned to normal after the severe snow storms of February. […]
Capitalists sure seem to prefer Obama to Bush.
by cactus The 1920s Depression: Glenn Beck, Thomas Woods, and “Benefits” of Cutting Taxes to Combat a Recession, Part 1 So I get an e-mail from reader Dean Moriarty, stating: Yesterday, I found myself in the sad position of inadvertantly listening to the Glenn Beck show. He was talking to some caller about how American […]
Robert Waldmann A year and a half ago I speculated as to how Lehman had managed to get it’s unsecured debt to be worth only 12 cents on the dollar. With my tinfoil hat firmly on, I wondered if they had written CDS on themselves. I may just be demonstrating my ignorance of the law […]
Brad DeLong and Mark Thoma posit that a falling US public deficit is bad news – they are right! Deficit hysteria is now mainstream thinking, while the more appropriate hysteria should be “jobs hysteria”. How in the world is nominal income growth expected to finance a drop in consumer debt leverage if the government supports […]