I’m going to have to do a little clean-up work here (i.e., run the data in Excel instead of Stata), so I’ll ask forgiveness for the double-labels and all that.Graphic redone; data as per FRED. I think the story is clear. The long version is Bruce’s post below. What is now the top line is […]
Headline from the Christian Science Monitor: “As G-20 battles protectionism, a cautionary tale in Ecuador” [emphasis mine] Subhead for that same article: “The country has put steep tariffs on an array of goods. Seventeen of the world’s 20 largest economies have broken recent promises not to take protectionist measures.” [emphasis mine] Presumably, the other three […]
Greg Mitchell’s twitter feed reminds us of Upton Sinclair’s 1934 campaign for Governor of California. Working on Sinclair’s campaign, as noted in an article we ran several years ago in NYRSF, was a former Naval Officer in his mid-20s whose career was cut short by tuberculosis: Robert A. Heinlein. As Mitchell notes: The champion of […]
McGill University Macroeconomics Comprehension Exam, May 2003, Question 10 (Essay): The stock market bubble burst in the spring of 2000. The popular pres now talks about a housing bubble, referring to ever rising prices of houses in North America (and elsewhere). They say that if the housing bubble bursts it will have a much more […]
The only possible response to this post is here.
A heartfelt congratulations to the United State of Georgia (from whose namesake “University of” I got my Finance MBA), which today passed California in the battle for Most Failed Banks (9 v 8) in the past year. In fairness, California did not have a failure until July, while Georgia waited until August. The two states […]
Reality (h/t Dr. Black): In certain ZIP codes in places like Homestead and Florida City, around 25 percent of the homes are in one stage of foreclosure or another. Countless others were built by developers and sit vacant in ghostly subdivisions, with not a buyer in sight. In the days after Andrew, then-Dade County Emergency […]
This is why we don’t believe the bailout will work the way you think it will (i.e., to increase lending): Recently, securities rated AAA have changed hands for roughly 30 cents on the dollar, and most of the buyers have been hedge funds acting opportunistically on a bet that prices will rise over time. However, […]
Via Instaputz, an explanation of why stealing tax dollars in order to decouple securities from the assets they are allegedly securitizing is A Really Stupid Idea, presented directly, yet also in a way an econometrician wiill understand.
The idea that they aren’t inviting Yves, CR, and Roubini onto the calls either led me to wonder for a moment if there was another factor in the invitations. But skipping Felix, even if he is a short-timer, means that they weren’t judging by the blog in the first place.