I’ve spent most of the past two weeks alternating between dizziness and sleep. Maybe the dizziness explains why I find myself in agreement with a WSJ editorial: In a better world, Citi would have long ago been put into bankruptcy. The FDIC could have taken over and disposed of the bank’s assets, while protecting insured […]

rdan We are all prone to folly at some point in our lives, for some things.

Robert Waldmann wrote earlier In defense of George Will’s claim “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” Post ombudsman Andy Alexander provided this link http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/global.sea.ice.area.pdf** to a *one page* document which includes the text “However, observed N. Hemisphere sea ice area is almost […]

Robert Waldmann I like to criticize financies, financial regulators and fresh water economists. I should defend something for once. It is easy to criticize. So I ask to what extent has the IS-LM-Phillips curve model been proven false. Also what useful insights can one gain from the IS-LM-Phillips curve model. A long long trip down […]

The WSJ reports on an Obama administration plan to convert US Treasury owned preferred shares to common stock. The plan seems to be an answer to the question “How does one save an insolvent bank without giving a windfall to current shareholders or nationalizing ? “ The government will convert its stake only to the […]

by cactus What do You do With a Bunch of Unsold Cars? Lloyd’s List had this story the other day: CAR manufacturer Toyota has so many unsold cars it has had to charter a ship to store them all. Toyota said today it had chartered a 2,500-capacity vessel which will simply stand idle in port […]

rdan The new budget 2010. Not sure where to start.

rdan

Robert Waldmann In this post, I mentioned something which I have been thinking about. It seems to me that many strategies of financial market participants are based on simultaneously believing that financial markets are efficient and inefficient. If financial markets are efficient, then the way to maximize risk adjusted returns is to buy and hold […]