Friday AM Reads
By Anna W - June 17th, 2011, 9:30AM
Here are today’s favorite reads:
• Why We Believe we are in a Secular Bear Market (Comstock)
• Paulson Funds Struggle as Big Bets Backfire; Gold Works (WSJ)
• IPO for BBH? Brown-blooded holdouts (The Economist)
• British govt backs banking reforms (AFP)
• Why Apple Isn’t in the Dow (Business Week)
• Papandreou Challenged by Confidence Vote (Bloomberg)
• Wall Street Braces for New Layoffs as Profits Wane (Deal Book)
• Pay-For-Play? McKinsey wrote previous study finding opposite of McKinsey study (Washington Post)
• The Brain on Trial (The Atlantic)
• Fascinating Jammer article: The Secret History of Iraq’s Invisible War (Wired)
What are you reading?
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June 17th, 2011 at 10:12 am
An interesting bit of history: http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v1n1/nonfiction/king_e/prayer_introduction.htm
Enjoy your weekend.
June 17th, 2011 at 12:05 pm
Looks like the SEC might be finally looking into Moody’s & Co. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303499204576389973019552548.html
Barry, any thoughts? Should we get our hopes up for any meaningful results?
And what are your thoughts on Moody’s “protected speech” defense in their lawsuits thus far? Don’t they need to bat 1.000 with that?
Thanks, BR. You rock.
June 17th, 2011 at 2:08 pm
Lol
http://www.borowitzreport.com/2010/05/03/greece-offers-to-repay-loans-with-giant-horse/
June 17th, 2011 at 3:01 pm
i little econ-father’s day reflection:
http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/06/17/why-economics-falls-down-in-the-face-of-fatherhood/
June 17th, 2011 at 7:09 pm
Why do so few realize that McKinsey is completely full of shit?
From the very top to botttom. A bunch of over-compensated, wet-behind-the-ears, self-entitled bullshit artists.
It astounds me that people still actually pay for this “information”.
If I ever and found that one of my people commissioned a McKinsey report I would give them the option of reimbursing the companny or handing in their resignation.
~~~
BR: You need to see this prior TBP post:
Is McKinsey & Co. the Root of All Evil ?
June 17th, 2011 at 8:33 pm
Has Comstock since the beginning of time ever thought we were not in a secular bear market?
Answer: NO
June 17th, 2011 at 9:17 pm
I just finished Field’s A Great Leap Forward about the rise in total factor productivity (TFP) during the Great Depression and beyond. It’s awesomely data driven. (Now I have to read Kendricks). Field argued that the 30s downturn forced further efficiencies in manufacturing, but particularly in transportation, and that these helped us serve as the arsenal of democracy during WWII. It’s a fascinating book covering a fascinating era of rising productivity. I hadn’t realized that the Great Depression was a great time to graduate with a STEM degree with all those research labs hiring. The number of engineers hired tripled between 1929 and 1933.
This was all part of a big transformation of the American economy driven by small electric motors and paved roads. Electric motors basically meant that factories could be completely restructured since you didn’t have to design around a single prime mover. Roads supplemented the rail system and lead to the rise of trucking, the end of seasonal shipping, and a total rethinking of how plants were located and materials moved. The author even suggests the slow TFP growth of the 70s and 80s was related to the final build out of the interstate highway system. Since I’ve read about 1/3 the issues of Fortune produced between 1930 and 1945, I was rather familiar with a lot of the details that this book only deals with in the aggregate. (For example, how railroads moved to containerization and changed goals towards actually moving cargo rather than simply getting trains out of one’s geographical sector.)
Our newer era of rising productivity is clearly driven by computerization. Computers are the new small electric motors and the internet is the new road system. Al Gore was right to open it to the private sector. (In contrast, Dan Quayle nearly killed remote sensing by trying to make it a government profit center rather than using it as a means to drive private sector innovation. You could get satellite images for the cost of a tape in the 70s, but just as computers were getting powerful enough to use them, the prices soared.) I expect people will look back at our era as we look back at the 30s, a period of economic travail, but of rising industrial efficiency. Let’s hope we don’t need a world war as an excuse to fix the demand deficit.
Of course, this is yet another book about the supply side. I’m looking for something to read about the demand side. Do economists even realize that you need people to buy the stuff? It isn’t magic. Are the mechanisms that create demand like some bizarre sexual kink that even Google doesn’t index with SafeSearch off?
Well, YOU asked what I’ve been reading.
June 17th, 2011 at 11:05 pm
I have been thinking about fish, due no part to reading, The Si’lailo Way: Indians, Salmon, and Law on the Columbia River, by Joseph Dupris et. al (http://www.amazon.com/Silailo-Way-Indians-Salmon-Columbia/dp/1594600856) a very interesting discourse.
But other internet sites are equally illuminating:
Historical overview:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jun/03/fish-stocks-information-beautiful#
Global perspectives: Fixing our broken oceans
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/asteiner13/English
Safety Nets: Did you know that 40% of the worlds population relies on fish for food?
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664090/could-better-designed-nets-help-save-7-million-tons-of-fish-a-year
Of course the United States has not agreed to the Law of the Sea.
http://www.state.gov/g/oes/ocns/opa/convention/
Flood waters raise the prospect of a larger dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/14/us-deadzone-idUSTRE75D59220110614
Why it matters:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/oceanography/dead-zone.htm
Local water problems:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/06/history-of-water-availability-in-rockies-region-shows-trouble-ahead.ars
(I suspect the recent extraordinary snowpack in California is part of the north-south cycle but I am not sure)
Some changes – Oregon laws to be the toughest in the US as to water quality-
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/17/oregon-clean-water-rules-_n_878959.html
I am not familiar with these rules but would be interested in hearing what others have to say. As noted before, yet another diffuse worry.
June 18th, 2011 at 7:38 am
Here’s more:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-21/whole-foods-lawsuit-over-chinese-frozen-vegetables-can-proceed-in-florida.html
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/06/inept-obama-anybody-but-warren-stance-reveals-fundamental-bank-v-middle-class-fault-line.html
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/06/201161664828302638.html
“Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/17/247570/paul-ryan-family-beneft-subsidies-for-big-oil-in-his-budget/
and while we’re at it:
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/17/247575/june-17-news-the-benefit-of-limiting-black-carbon-u-n-climate-talks-make-scant-progress-to-save-kyoto/
Have a nice weekend everyone.