Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

US Legislators Profiting from War? Say it ain’t so, Joe

Seems it’s not just the executive branch and their friends that have “invested” in this war. From IPS comes a news article about the money invested by our legislators. Members of Congress invested nearly 196 million dollars of their own money in companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon contracts […]

Shop til you drop due diligence

This article describes the recent history of corn flour for tortillas in Mexico. I looked it up after Stormy’s recent post on Wages and prices. By 1996, Maseca had drawn the attention of Archer Daniels Midland, the world’s largest corn broker. Itself no stranger to government largesse, ADM spotted a good business model from across […]

Hat tip to Afferentinput for referring to The Big Picture which demonstrated this cool site hotpads.com. Look up your own area for housing information with lots of color. The median income data was dated for my area, but the foreclosure data was relatively accurate to my knowledge. END

Your wish is my command….

I have added the ‘read more’ option to open in a separate page format rather than same page because I also added in line commenting for the second page, which in my mind made it easier. The pop-up window is maintained for convenience with out going to the full page for your convenience as a […]

Must see video

There is a must see video at Economists View by Elizabeth Warren of Harvard University at U. Berkley lecture series on the The Coming Collapse of the Midddle Class. Noni Mausa says… Take the time. Watch this, I just did. It explains exactly why the middle class is in trouble and where the money has […]

Quality Spreads and Capacity Utilization

K. Harris had a nice comment about the direction of causal relationship in my last blog. Care to discuss the direction of cause and effect in this chart of quality spreads and capacity utilization. Is the current quality spread a measure of the bond market forecast of economic activity? END

Social Science Research Insights

Surprising insights from the social sciences By Kevin Lewis April 6, 2008 Do conservative values and conservative economics go hand in hand? A sociologist looked at broad surveys of Americans to find out whether conservative Protestants – the 25 percent of the population belonging to churches that emphasize a literal reading of the Bible, personal […]

I could own 1/100th of a house…or less

This article in the Private Equity Law Review indicates that unravelling the 45 Trillion could be interesting. Judge Christopher A. Boyko’s order dismissing a number of foreclosure actions brought by a CDO trustee throws a hard light on a common practice in real estate loan syndication. Due to the cost of properly assigning the notes […]

Imported Inflation ?

The NY Times had a very good article on inflationary pressure from Asia this morning. The article was titled Asian Inflation Begins to Sting US Shoppers. It did a very good job of giving information about how inflationary pressures were driving prices higher in Asia and correctlypointed out that it was showing up in US […]

Complicated politics in the ME

Iraqi politics certainly is complicated. Try this article. So, I was at a great Center for American Progress panel yesterday with journalists Nir Rosen and Michael Ware. They have been in Iraq for most of the last five years and get the perspective on the ground the we don’t usually hear about here. Ware said […]