10 Thursday PM Reads
By Barry Ritholtz - February 9th, 2012, 4:30PM
My afternoon train reading:
• The Top Twelve Reasons Why You Should Hate the Mortgage Settlement (Naked Capitalism)
• Mutual Fund Investors Should Crack Down on Closet Indexers: (Bloomberg)
• The logic of a Thomson Reuters takeover of the Financial Times (Guardian)
• Corporate profits aren’t what they seem (Chron)
• A First for UBS: Bonus Clawbacks (WSJ)
• The Recession of 2007–2009 (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
• Floyd Norris: No, Eeejits, People Are Not Leaving the Labor Force (Economix)
• Mitt Romney and the enthusiasm gap (Washington Post)
• Hit record: Less Posts, More Traffic (Open Salon)
• Why Planned Parenthood Had To Fight Back So Hard (TPM)
What are you reading?
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February 9th, 2012 at 5:04 pm
Thanks BR,
Great “Game is Over” cartoon!
And today the US Congress is deeply divided over the proposed ban on “Insider Trading” by its members.
Toto, are we in Kansas yet?
February 9th, 2012 at 5:41 pm
Re: closet indexers
My suspicion is that 401ks and 403bs are a fertile breeding ground for these. The financial firms are looking to be able to generate fees from 12b-1s etc on those which is difficult to justify for a Vanguard index fund. So you pretend it is active, and you can pick up an extra 0.5-1.0%. The corporation wants to be able to show employees that they are keeping up with the overall stock market, so a fund that looks like it is roughly tracking the S&P 500 etc. will fit that bill. Win-win for everybody but the employee.
It will be interesting to see if the new disclosure rules change any of this. I would hope that we would see an average reduction of 0.25% to 0.5% of NAV in fees over the next few years.
February 9th, 2012 at 6:01 pm
Has anyone heard and consequently researched anything about US data (GDP, etc) being distorted because (let me distill this as best I can) US agencies are understaffed and underfunded, so they are not crunching numbers and double checking the as diligently as they used to, they are not treating the great recession of late 2008-early 2009 as an anomaly and instead are averaging it into their numbers, all of this resulting in seasonally adjusted numbers for late 2011 and early 2012 appearing rosier than they really are?
And was industrial production was amplified in late 2011 by companies spending before the end of the year because of the expiration of capital expenditures deductions?
If this is so, might Q2 numbers be unsavory?
February 9th, 2012 at 6:15 pm
On the Naked Capitalism point piece.
Just about anyone and everyone in the Obama administration involved in economic/finance issues (past present) has links to the Clinton administration. The commonality that I wish to bring up is they all seem to believe that confidence in the banking system is paramount. These are also some of the same people that caused the crisis with regard to derivatives and Glass Stegal.
Susan Weber’s outrage is justified.
February 9th, 2012 at 11:10 pm
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted to grant a license for two new nuclear reactors at a site in eastern Georgia owned by Southern Company. Their partner, Georgia Power, claims the construction of the two new nuclear reactors will “lower their customer’s electric bills“.
Even putting aside that they have no plans to modify their design to address the ‘Fukushima-Go-Boom’ problem, hands down THE most expensive way to generate electricity is with nuclear power.
February 9th, 2012 at 11:10 pm
Agree with Comic.
Bush Ruined America.
One Dollar One Vote!
February 10th, 2012 at 6:47 am
Check this out for cognitive ability.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lznmFdAf78&feature=player_embedded
Then see if you can do better than the chimp.
http://games.lumosity.com/chimp.html
February 10th, 2012 at 8:53 am
@JimRino
Of course it’s all Bush’s fault! He obviously controlled the Supreme court like a puppet master, even after he was no longer president.