A couple of days ago, James Bianco, chez Ritholtz, noted a WSJ article entitled “Dividend Stocks Become the Heroes”: This year, the 100 stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index with the highest dividend yields are up an average of 3.7% before dividend payouts, according to Birinyi Associates. The 100 lowest-yielding stocks are down […]
My Economics Professor in MBA School, Peter Klein, lectured fondly of the Indian (as in subcontinent, not AmerInd) “entrepreneurs” who risked life and limb going through rubbish heaps looking for scrap metal and other items that could be sold. Despite the risk—I’m not writing metaphorically when I say “risked life and limb”—it was the best […]
In the midst of an essay on Louis C.K., Bob Lefsetz (chez Ritholtz) explains what the Lemieuxes and (now, sadly) Mannions of the world keep ignoring: One of the reasons artists have lost power is they no longer lead.It’s kind of like our President. He’s so busy appeasing people thateven his natural constituency is turned […]
Note: I wasn’t going to post this, but after all the flack Willard Romney is receiving about offering to bet his fellow millionaires $10,000, I find myself in the unusual position of being sympathetic to him. Therefore, the story of the day in early November of 1992 on which I offered to bet $10,000: UPDATE: […]
The Obama Administration Is Making It Really Hard for Its Base to Mobilize. Actually, the Obama Administration has been making it Really Effing Easy for Its Base to Mobilize since around the time Tim Geithner was appointed. That mobilization is just away from the voting booth and onto the streets. Give You a Hint, Barry: […]
Buce sends us to Der Spiegel’s description of Barack Obama’s potential 2012 opponents (“You Think This is Bad?”) John Kay in today’s FT (no link) tells us why letting economists pontificate about finance is a Mug’s Game. The mugging being of people who are stupid enough to believe economists. (If Brad DeLong or Mark Thoma […]
Brad DeLong (pulled from an otherwise-spot-on post): Two years ago, after all, the recession was over. The Recovery: I started these from the first month after NBER’s recession end date. Note that there is one true, consistent growth line—sadly, that’s the mean (average) duration of Unemployment. If this is victory, Pyrrhus of Epirus had nothing […]
Not a very long time, even if there were full and complete co-operation. Or, as LBJ said, Source (cross-posted from Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo)
byMike Kimel Barry Ritholtz points us to a Bloomberg article showing, once again, that when it came to measures to prop up the economy in 2008, some animals are more equal than others: Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out. So […]
byMike Kimel [edited to make authorship clearer] Libertarians come in many flavors, but I think most of them would agree that in an ideal world, the government would be very small and have limited powers – essentially, the government would control national defense and perhaps adjudicate over property rights disputes (i.e., maintain police and/or the […]