My Thursday afternoon post speech reading material:
• Attention Europe: Effectiveness of short-selling bans in doubt (FT.com)
• Evidence Of Coming Recession Is Overwhelming (Comstock Funds)
• A Short List: Who Else Wants to Break Up the Big Banks? (American Banker)
• Top quant to next generation: You Suck (FT.com)
• From Underwater to ‘Equity Poor’: Why the Housing Market Isn’t Recovering Faster (Time) see also this WTF column CNBC to Promote House Flipping (Forbes)
• Saving California’s struggling cities (LA Times)
• Empirics and Psychology: Eight of the World’s Top Young Economists Discuss Where Their Field Is Going (Big Think)
• Libor Scandal Timeline: What Did the Fed Know and When Did it Know It? (ProPublica) see also Uh Oh: Fidelity Joins BlackRock in Weighing Libor Action Against Banks (Bloomberg)
• No credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees (CNet)
• A World Without Coral Reefs (NYT)
What are you reading?
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Apple’s Reality-Check Quarter In Charts
Source: SplatF
Category: Financial Press
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
I’m glad WFC was never part of the LIBOR fix!!!
“Be careful of what you wish for, or you may surely regret it?”
Does the commitment to “save” the Euro seem out-of-whack to anyone else? If the Euro is destined to fail, will the commitment to save it lead to unbalanced and myopic decision-making, just to keep a promise?
This promise which is fraught with danger and demagogic thinking IMO.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-dollar-gains-on-euro-slips-against-kiwi-2012-07-26
Have a good evening, and weekend.
Obama’s religion problems:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/07/poll-only-half-say-obama-is-a-christian/1#.UBGw37SJdM8
who needs facts? seems like i saw a story where facts had died
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2012/07/mitt_romney_and_the_republican_party_do_not_want_to_disclose_basic_truths_for_fear_that_someone_will_use_these_facts_against_them_some_day_.html
Political money flows in from all corners of the world to buy our politicians.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/169095/mitt-romneys-bankster-ball#
Breitbart on Holder and MF Global
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/07/26/REVEALED-Corzine-s-MF-Global-Was-a-Client-of-Eric%20Holder-s-Law-Firm
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE86P0R820120726?irpc=932
pop music is all too loud, and it all sounds the same (based on a study).
factors that explain why the economy isn’t working
There is a global insufficiency of demand relative to an immense oversupply of labor and productive capacity.
The imbalances between high-wage/current-account-deficit/balance-sheet-indebted nations and lower-wage, surplus nations have produced a glut of savings in the latter, relative to the opportunities offered for profitable investment of those savings in additional capacity either at home or abroad, given the absence of demand for such additional capacity.
The excess savings have inexorably reduced the cost of money in the developed world to the historically low levels we again achieved this week. The sole exception to this phenomenon being in the peripheral regions of the Eurozone, owing to the perverse and economically unnatural condition of their being caught in a currency union absent a fiscal union and internal credit support (a subject of many earlier posts on this blog).
The private sector debt overhang in the advanced deficit economies (including, for this purpose, the portion of the sovereign debts of those countries that was taken on to subsidize internal welfare systems in lieu of, or in addition to, households taking on debt directly) is preventing the recovery of internal demand. Moreover, as the great Irving Fisher wrote during the Great Depression, the very act of attempting to reduce debt has once again ignited the paradox of reduced economic activity, employment and income causing consumers to become even more debt-dependent. Quoting Fisher: “The more debtors pay, the more they owe.” We saw this materialize vividly during the second quarter as aggregate consumer debt zoomed past its bubble era highs.
We are enduring the unfortunate coincidence of the two foregoing phenomenon coincident with a generational (as in, once-in-a-generation) new technological plateau that appears to find an ever expanding number of labor-saving, productivity-increasing, job-obsoleting applications; and
The developed world has achieved population demographics that force us to confront painful intergenerational economic issues—amidst the historic levels of economic insecurity that impact younger generations as a result of the foregoing issues.
“Four Factors”—summarized as follows: (i) exogenous oversupply relative to global demand, (ii) classic Fisher-described debt deflation, (iii) excess technological productivity relative to the availability of global labor, and (iv) inter-generational demographic challenges.
http://www.economonitor.com/danalperts2cents/2012/07/24/another-summer-of-discontent-the-four-factors-that-explain-why-what-were-doing-isnt-working/
Sceptics abound as Mario Draghi’s ECB bond ‘bluff’ electrifies global markets
http://goo.gl/dXOQD
a new (ok old ) way to cut labor costs
http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/26/12951936-growing-number-of-workers-complain-about-being-shortchanged?lite
Uncle (and other gov’s) created / funded/ incubated: the Net, the digital computer, the compiler, the general purpose programming language and a host of other cool stuff like GPS, the space program, jet transport and more than could possibly be listed in a comment.
Most of the above are military projects. The military, particularly in times of real or perceived threat can marshal resources like nothing else. That may be a bit disconcerting to the more social democratic side of the isle I think. But the right is delusional (or ignorant) in their belief that governments don’t create new things. It is true that competition begets innovation but the right seems to think that capital markets are the only kind of competition out there. I suppose some of them don’t believe in evolution but even leaving that off couples, families, clans, tribes, nations, teams (all of which are governments of one type or another) vie with each other and entropy all the time and have created just about everything in civilization including capital markets.
the American banker link doesn’t seem to work
http://www.americanbanker.com/gallery/too-big-too-fail-breaking-up-big-banks-1048735-1.html
defenders of the banksters?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-26/breaking-up-banks-won-t-make-them-safer-ex-senator-says.html
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/07/26/banking-lawyer-cohen-big-bank-deals-can-work/?mod=WSJBlog
A DOUBLE-BARRELED HOUSING BOTTOM CALL
On the Nightly Business Report, Stan Humphries and Mark Zandi both declared that housing had bottomed:
* STAN HUMPHRIES, CHIEF ECONOMIST, ZILLOW: The bottom has officially arrived, we believe.
* MARK ZANDI, CHIEF ECONOMIST, MOODY’S ANALYTICS: We’re done. The crash is over. Housing is improving.
NBR
Note, this was Tuesday, prior to the Wednesday release of the bad ‘New Home Sales’ data.
so the SEC could prosecute bankster and JPM. but will they?
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/07/occupy-the-sec-urges-the-sec-to-investigate-jp-morgan-over-likely-as-in-bloomin-obvious-sarbanes-oxley-violations-ows.html
Re YOU SUCK
Could it be that the past decade has attracted people who just want to be rich to interview for his positions? I know a couple of students in very good B-schools who find a fair number of students insufferable in that they just want to get good grades so that they can be hired to do finance and investment banking so that they can make lots of money – “shallow” is an adjective I hear, along with some unprintable ones. Apparently the students who actually want to study process, strategy etc. are interested in career tracks of actually running businesses.
Speculation About Romney’s Taxes
Years of filings in state of Delaware prove definitively that the candidate himself is a corporation
http://www.theonion.com/articles/speculation-about-romneys-taxes,28927/
So, grad students are telling the Quants: “Now that we know you’ve build an economic system designed to fail, and has failed, I don’t want to work for YOU”.
Apple: Killing off the enthusiasm of the developer community:
Killed Hardware:
- XServer
- The Workstation
- The 17 inch MacBook Pro.
Plus, at war with Java, instead of at war with Google.
- Which means Tomcat, can it be installed, and for how long?
- Database: HyperSql, kill Java on Apple, and this goes too.
- Oracle software, No DB support for latest releases, SqlDeveloper? dead next release of the OS?
- Oracle client?
Which makes a developer ask the question: “Is Unix Next?”, because a smart phone doesn’t need Unix.
Then there are Apple’s own big tools:
- How long are they to survive?
Is Apple becoming a consumer toy company?
That was ok, as long as they kept the desktop support.
But, now that’s in question.
Is my next computer a, FTW, Dell?
Romney London Fund Raising: WAIT: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia LAUGHED at the idea that Foreign Nations and Corporations could BUY US ELECTIONS.
Are you saying Antonin Scalia is wrong?
But wait, there’s more [ Foreign Money in Romney Campaign ]
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/07/25/578531/romney-bundler-registered-foreign-agent-hong-kong/
And you wanted to know why they outsource…
@JimRino: Java? Really? I don’t see how Apple can kill Java. Java is already mostly dead.
It’s a disruptive time in the development world. I’m betting on HTML, CSS, ecmaScript, node, mongoDB at the moment. It’s a dog’s breakfast but I think the hardware will grow into it. The alternative is betting everything on a single ecosystem. The one thing Java had going for it was the write once promise. The web stack comes closest to delivering that right now.
Can the RICO statute be applied to banks that submitted bogus LIBOR inputs? The mere threat should drive a lot of cooperation by people adverse to doing time in the Big House.
give it a rest Comstock, geeeezzz.
The article on California city bankruptcies contains this sentence:
But where is “local control” when citizens of cash-strapped municipalities must watch helplessly as their city officials are overwhelmed by the implacable pressures of strident interest groups refusing to cede ground when the only escape is shared sacrifice?
Is this not a perfect sentence for the national problem too?
On LIBOR, since it is a compilation of many (18?) banks’ reports and since the 4 highest and 4 lowest are discarded, has anyone established that the funny business actually moved Libor? Much? Or, did those low-balling their rates only cause their numbers to be discarded (as one of the 4 lowest?)
seems the banks tried to move in synch (or at least thats what Barclay’s said). if they do then the 8 that get thrown out, are that far off from the others. wonder if any ones has looked at that. cause that would be a really big hint that the whole thing was rigged, but then thats seems to be what banks have admitted to (behind the scenes).
since we now know this, why do we continue to use it for any thing at all?