Random Linkage
A few interesting items that caught my eye this weekend:
• Banking’s revisionist history (The Economist)
• Paul Krugman’s fear for lost decade (Guardian)
• Joseph Stiglitz on Wall Street’s Toxic Message (Vanity Fair)
• No, We’re Hardly Another Zimbabwe (Barron’s)
• Looking (unsuccesfully) for the economic recovery everyone seems to be talking about (econbrowser)
• Public debt: The biggest bill in history (The Economist)
• THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING HARVARD (Boston.com)
• Info-porn: The largest bankruptcies in US history (Good)
• The Myth of De-Leveraging (marketclues)
• Digitial Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online (Wired)
• Israel outlines terms for Palestinian state (BBC)
• First extragalactic exoplanet may have been found (New Scientist)
• 30 ROCK is a rip-off of THE MUPPET SHOW! (Brian Lynch)
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June 14th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
They ought to bring back The Muppet Show. Especially given how long of a run “The Simpsons” have had.
June 14th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
As usual the Economist is months late to the Party. The Big Party, thrown by the world’s largest economies, and billed to their taxpayers. This is the point, that stimulus must be paid for. Even that Charles Dickens of economic literature, Barry Ritholtz, has pointed out you can’t drink yourself sober.
Where do we go from here? Unless we want to be expatriots, we make decisions here on what the future holds globally. My own thoughts are that the Brazils, Chinas, Indias of the world make out better than the Americas, Britains, Europes…..
It is almost like our own mortgage crisis, on a grander scale. We can no longer pay the mortgage, but the Bank (China, Saudi, you know…) is not willing to foreclose on us just yet. We may think things are ok, since the cops haven’t come with the foreclosure notice yet, but they are not fine. And we will not buy our way out of this with money that is not backstopped…it won’t happen.
We should drink a beer and talk about this. In fact, this is running day, and my wife and I are going to do just that when we get through in a while with our Sunday afternoon run with our buds.
June 14th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Bernanke reminds me of Beaker. Food for fear.
@Stiglitz: Correct. How much more havoc does the “Chicago School” need to ?
Actually, if memory serves me correctly, Stiglitz was once at Chicago, which is where he achieved his fame. So it must not be all bad? Did he fall or was he pushed?
Drink yourself sober? So who the hell wants to be sober???? Haven’t you heard of three martini lunches? In the Big Apple, it’s an afternoon of indulgence. Over maybe. It’s called a business lunch. Business expense. Hey, a guy/gal has to do what one has to do.
June 14th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
re: The Incredible Shrinking Harvard…
Interestingly enough old Lawrence Summers name pops up again as a member of the Harvard Corporation. This corporation manages the Harvard Endowment. http://www.uni-muenster.de/PeaCon/global-texte/g-b/Harvard/Harvard-Corp.htm
Rubin was also a memeber of that Board.
Harvard has had a peculiar recent history that one would expect to destabilize its endowment more than others. I used the term “super-egoed-economist” above to refer to Larry Summers’ indisputably huge ego, but that doesn’t mean he knows what he’s doing as a policy maker or administrator. Summers helped create the bubble in the national economy and came back to Harvard to create bubbles in biomedical research (as though the NIH budget would double indefinitely) and to foist brobdingnagian, unaffordable expansion plans in general.
But basic infrastructure, such as House and athletic facilities, were left unrenewed and faculty salaries merely rose with a vague inflation number.
Summers has presided over more bubbles than Lawrence Welk…
He is a man of a yesterday that never really was. Yale has never had a Summers, and that’s a very good thing.
But Robert Rubin has been a bigger source of problems for Harvard than Summers has, much better at evading the consequences of his own incompetence (vis-a-vis CITI)…Most important, HE’S STILL THERE. Rubin was a prime mover in elevating Summers to both Secretary of the Treasury and the Harvard presidency. Once in office, Summers elevated Rubin to the Corporation along with others and the Summers-nominated Corporation, in turn, authorized the University policies that Summers attempted to effect.
That attempt brought down his presidency, leaving both Harvard and its endowment company the divided, undermanaged messes they are today. Aside from Summers’ replacement, the same Corporation is in office today.
BR…
with Lawrence Summers track record, one could only expect that our HOPE & CHANGE President will appoint Summers to replace Bernanke as the next Fed Chairman…
Then…”The Incredible Shrinking Harvard” becomes the incredible shrinking USA…
June 14th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Ah, Krugman.
Interesting take. Massive stimulus, it now appears to the dear professor, may not do the trick. How do I explain this…”We should have stimulated more”….(always plays well in Peoria…) or “We may become a second Japan”…Well that is not what you postulated last fall….massive stimulus would be our godhead, and get us back to normal.
Then, there is the unspoken “What if we’d allowed Citibank to fail” idea…but of course that is just to preposterous to contemplate….better we should all marry our cousins and have brain damaged children…
June 14th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
@B in Tn: You really do enjoy subtle don’t you. Or laying it between the lines.
How do you do that as it a Doc??
The good news is you’re going to live several weeks, but not too many.
Or, well, your facelift will work five years if you don’t smile a lot. Otherwise.
Or, well we reconstructed as much as we could but not quite enough.
June 14th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Some interesting ones:
2 Japanese carrying $134 bil worth of U.S. bonds detained in Italy
http://www.japantoday.com/category/crime/view/2-japanese-carrying-134-bil-worth-of-us-bonds-detained-in-italy
In India, Investors ‘Buy Anything’
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124465435180702675.html
Some Gentlemen’s Clubs Strip Down Upscale Offerings as Business Slumps
“…In January, Rick’s converted its high-end club in Dallas to an all-nude, bring-your-own-beer venue…”
“…Several report that it’s easier to hire “exotic dancers” now that many women are being laid off from more buttoned-down, white-collar jobs. Among the new recruits at Rick’s and VCG are a laid-off paralegal, a laid-off fashion designer, a Bank of America banker, a former paralegal and two Los Angeles real estate agents…”
“…An entertainer at Rick’s Las Vegas club who uses the stage name Buffy says many customers are spending a set amount of cash rather than running tabs on their credit cards. Now 34 years old, she says she is earning only 25% of what she got before the recession. “It’s not quite the elite crowd that used to come in,” she adds…”
“…”Will you make money here? Absolutely,” says a 36-year-old whose stage name is Sara. She says she quit her job as a mortgage broker in San Francisco last year to begin dancing at Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club in Las Vegas in January…”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124467942901904435.html
June 14th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
alfred e:
In medicine, you simply tell the truth…always.
June 14th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
@B inTN: So do WS agents (tell the truth). But I have a sense you’re several cuts above the average.
So, I was having fun with someone that understands that. Where the hell is Frankie?
But there are more important ways to deal with the current, above and beyond this blog. And you have far more power and magic than I do. So what can I do to help?
June 14th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Actually, the idea of hiding a poor prognosis from a patient is long gone…it is the stuff now of movies, but not actual practice. Rarely you’ll have a son or daughter want to protect mom, but again, realism is the day after day reality in any medical practice now.
I don’t like Krugman’s know it all attitude, in the articles he’s written, or the things I’ve seen on video. Economics, even more than medicine, is not an exact science. And frankly, I really don’t like this backpedal…now that it appears the consumer is not going to bail the government out of its spending experiment..
…just the way I look at it. I would, for instance, never tell a melanoma patient with a 5 mm. lesion that surgery would guarantee a cure. It wouldn’t…
June 14th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
@B in TN: Well, hey guy. Let it all hang out. Good for you. We’re buds.
June 14th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Alfred:
Life, absolutely nothing I deserve, has been wonderful to me. I am trying to make it a little better for those around me too. I have offered to pay my daughter-in-law’s way through nursing school…she didn’t get the chance…and she should start this fall…
June 14th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Enjoyed the 30Rock v. Muppets article. Brilliant. I always loved the Muppet Show when I was a kid…thought it was genius. Equally love 30Rock….now I know why.
June 15th, 2009 at 1:46 am
There’s a good piece comparing the current situation to the 1930′s over at nakedcapitalism, which in turn references an article, “A Tale of Two Depressions” that is chock full of interesting charts.
However, it might be too bearish for this crowd of green shooting gardeners.
June 15th, 2009 at 1:48 am
OT but hilarious bit from The Onion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yiQXPOO1Yo
Thought this crowd would appreciate it. :)
June 15th, 2009 at 2:34 am
@Onlooker: Not OT. On OT. Perfect. Thanks