Housing: Permits, Starts, Completions
For the crowd who are still clinging to the RE recovery meme, have a gander at these charts. Note that there are more new permits than starts, and more new starts than completions: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Thee (Not Me) Click to enlarge: ˜˜˜ ˜˜˜ All charts via...
Did Facebook Executives Privately Tell Institutional Investors to Lower Their Estimates on the IPO?
Did Facebook Feed Inside Information to the Big Boys … While Leaving the Individual Investor In the Dark? Reader McFid – who has been a breach of fiduciary duty expert since 2003 – sent me the following article: Today, The Daily Beast reports that certain underwriters may have lowered their revenue projections prior to the...
So, You Think You Really Know What Happened with Facebook’s IPO on Friday?
We received many calls on Friday looking for our take on how NASDAQ handled the Facebook IPO. We answered those calls fairly un-sensationally, and even congratulated NASDAQ for not BATS-ing. Looking back on Friday’s action, and our perceptions, we were actually relieved that Facebook didn’t do a Faceplant. Isn’t it sad that if an IPO...
Congressional Threat to Every Investor, Business Owner and Citizen
Congressional Threat to Every Investor, Business Owner and Citizen May 21, 2012 This is an open letter in response to legislation recently passed in the US House of Representatives. The behavior of Representative Harold Rogers, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, has made the front page of The New York Times, describing the $17,000 drip...
Four Years After AIG, Wall Street Back to its Old Tricks
> My Sunday Washington Post Business Section column is out. This morning, we look at the JPM debacle: Has the Economy been made safe from Wall Street? The short answer is not very. The print version had the full headline Four short years after AIG, Wall Street is back to its old tricks (The online version...
Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs
Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs from The Long Now Foundation on FORA.tv > From his perspective as a pyschology researcher, Philip Tetlock watched political advisors on the left and the right make bizarre rationalizations about their wrong predictions at the time of the rise of Gorbachev in the 1980s and the eventual collapse...
Chris Whalen & Jeff Madrick Debate JP Morgan’s Losses
Last week JP Morgan Chase acknowledged a trading loss of at least $2 billion, fueling calls by some observers for more regulation of financial institutions. Chris Whalen, a Senior Managing Director at Tangent Capital Partner, tells Bloomberg Law’s Lee Pacchia that it was actually too much regulation that led to the loss. Jeff Madrick, a...
The Great Moderation, Forecast Uncertainty, and the Great Recession
The Great Recession of 2007-09 was a dramatic macroeconomic event, marked by a severe contraction in economic activity and a significant fall in inflation. These developments surprised many economists, as documented in a recent post on this site. One factor cited for the failure to anticipate the magnitude of the Great Recession was a form...
ECB: EU Economy Strikingly Similar to 1990s Japan
Fascinating discussion from Bloomberg Briefings: The ECB appears to be understating the similarities between the weak growth outlook in Japan after its domestic asset bubbles popped in the early 1990s and that for the euro area in the present crisis. The performance of the Japanese economy 20 years ago was better than that of the...
MIA: Bond Vigilantes
Following up on a previous matter, Karl Denninger posted what is supposed to pass for a rebuttal to my recent post on government spending. To my eyes, as Jay Bookman so aptly put it, it looks like “the octopus trick, squirting black ink to cloud your retreat.” True enough. Anyway, done with that discussion. Paul...
QOTD: How Knowledge Advances
At James Montier‘s CFA presentation, he used one of my favorite quotes: “Science advances one funeral at a time.” -Max Planck’s I would add to that: If only economics were so fortunate . . .
Geithner Channels Greenspan and Airbrushes Fraud Out of Our Crises
Geithner channels Greenspan and Airbrushes Fraud out of our Crises William K. Black > On April 25, 2012, Treasury Secretary Geithner made remarkable statements about the role of elite financial fraud and greed in producing our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. In this first installment I focus on the first of five problems...
