My morning reads:
• The Odd Couple of Indexes (Barron’s)
• Focus on Process (Derek Hernquist)
• Treasury 10-Year Yields Head for Record Low on Demand for Haven (Bloomberg) see also BRIC Dominance Fades as State Meddling Curbs Equity Returns (Bloomberg)
• ECRI Update: Flunking Recession 101 (dshort)
• What’s the use of economics? (Vox)
• Peter Orszag’s Chart Of The Year Could Change Everything You Think About Healthcare (Business Insider)
• Silver: As Swing Districts Dwindle, Can a Divided House Stand? (538)
• Google’s big push to make better iOS apps than Apple (Gigaom)
• The irresponsible Republican Party (The Plum Line) see also Blodget: This One Chart Shows That The Fiscal Cliff Fiasco Is The Republicans’ Fault (Business Insider)
• New book slams financial advice industry (InvestmentNews)
What are you reading?
Can Bank Stocks Continue to Party in New Year?
Source: WSJ
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.
Originators keep QE profits as mortgage rates stay high while funding costs, MBS rates drop
http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2012/12/why-isnt-the-thirty-year-fixed-rate-mortgage-at-26-percent-.html
China academics seek political reform, warn of violent revolution
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/12/31/uk-china-politics-idUKBRE8BU01S20121231
I read this light, but insightful, commentary on a musician’s view of the meme, “it’s on the web, so it must be correct.”
It should be pretty clear to all by now that the Grand Old Party has morphed its way into the American Taliban Party and will soon become extinct.
I just ran across this article which asserts that new documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent.
[emphasis mine]
I wish there were more reporting on the growing tensions between China and its neighbors, especially the increasingly bellicose stuff between the new Japanese government and the new Chinese political leadership, which may be losing control over the military.
Better description than average of one of deutsche banks accounting scandals
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/b2f29dce-527b-11e2-8e1b-00144feab49a.html#axzz2GeikhUpy
valuation and accounting remains in the toilet
Simon Johnson see some signs of reform progress on project syndicate
accounting and valuation is not one them
the learning process from 2008 is taking a heluva long time
but i also see some progress
Happy new year!
apparently just repeating the truth over and over and over again
with only minor riffs
can also make progress and slowly wear down the lies
keep it up Barry!
A happy new year to everyone.Bonne année et bonne santé. And thanks Barry for keeping this cool, enlightening blog alive.
Am rereading Lords of Finance
http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356987762&sr=1-1&keywords=lords+of+finance
Had checked it out of the library a couple of years ago and enjoyed it. When we were at an estate sale a few weeks ago, it was apparent the former owner (always sad to see it) had widely read in history and finance. There was a practically new copy for $2 so couldn’t pass it up.
Anyways, what struck me most recently in it was his description of Britain’s attempt to regain it’s status as a financial center by making getting back on the gold standard. In attempting to do this, it imposed austerity much like we are seeing in Europe today and like the billionaires and clueless want to impose on everyone else over here. They wound up inflicting over a decade worth 10%+ unemployment on the country and never did solve the problem.
Another striking similarity was the description of the contrast between London and the manufacturing centers in the 20′s: London was full of the Bertie Wooster’s partying, e.g. the P of W and lots of other useless P’s, while the industrial cities were in depression.
Reminds one of Santayana’s saying. Going by the publication date, these descriptions had to have been written in 2009 at the latest, so it’s not like he was editorializing based what has been happening in the EU for the last two years. I suppose none of our financial overlords bothers reading history.
Re: Google’s big push
Some of Google’s recent actions have been driven by the realization that it can’t keep making the money it had been serving ads on the desktop; there’s just not enough room in a phone browser for a lot of ads. OTOH, if it can get people to use it’s apps instead of a browser, it can serve targeted ads in the app.
«Simon Johnson see some signs of reform progress on project syndicate
accounting and valuation is not one them»
It will remain like that. Accounting and valuation are the main tools for playing fantasy finance with real currency.
Who has a vested interested in realistic accounting and valuations and is prepared to spend a lot of money and fight hard for the situation to change? Nobody of consequence.
There are too many holes in accounts and too many fantasy valuations, and too many people who benefit from those holes and fantasies to remain hidden.
And it is not just executives and traders: consider pensioners whose pension funds are mostly invested in stocks. Do they want realistic valuations and accounting to expose vast holes in their pension funds? HELL NO! What they want is the fiction to go on, the pension funds to continue paying out pensions as if the holes did not exist as long as they live, and then it is somebody else’s problem.
Fantasy accounting and valuation will end only when insufficient cashflow makes continuing the fiction impossible, as in Madoff’s case.
Therefore the colossal expansion of central banks balance sheets, to provide new cash to all sorts of bankrupt situations. It has not created massive inflation only because employment and wages are being savagely pushed down to transfer the cost of providing that cashflow to workers.
David Frum summarized the situation quite well:
http://nymag.com/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/index4.html
«Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending or the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares.
This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.»
And that’s not just Republicans… Grover Norquist also provided a good summary:
«Now if you say we’re going to smash the big corporations, 60-plus percent of voters say “That’s my retirement you’re messing with. I don’t appreciate that”. And the Democrats have spent 50 years explaining that Republicans will pollute the earth and kill baby seals to get market caps higher. And in 2002, voters said, “We’re sorry about the seals and everything but we really got to get the stock market up.”»