Ed Glaeser Advice on Storytime for Kids
Ed Glaeser was an economics professor of mine in college. He proudly called his class “boot camp” for economists and noted that while his class reviews always said that his class was “too difficult and too fast”, he never planned to change it. When I found out that he wrote a piece for the New [...]
China threatens to trigger US dollar crash
From the Telegraph (HT: Serena): The Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its vast holding of US Treasury bonds if Washington imposes trade sanctions to force a yuan revaluation. Two Chinese officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent [...]
Dilbert does subprime
If you’ve ever wondered just how the decision-making process which caused countless (supposedly) intelligent financial analysts to buy into securitized subprime mortgages and then cause the global economy to tank, a recent Dilbert might just have the answer: I think “it’s called math” and “I feel all savvy” pretty much wrap it up. For those [...]
I wish I had this job
(Hat tip: Bill, who works for the government, so he technically fits the bill here)
BORROW
Would you like to see some very sad graphs that illustrate why our financial system is in such dire straits? Of course you do. (HT: Lisa X) What the blue line above shows is how much banks have borrowed from the Fed (the Fed’s BORROW index). You’ll notice (or maybe you won’t because of the [...]
You know your economy is in trouble when…
There is a “black market” that evolves to sell currency (b/c they don’t trust the fiat or official currency values) That black market is being carried out in the Classified ads of your country’s newspapers HT: Marginal Revolutions: In the classifieds on the web of the daily Iceland newspaper Mbl, you find hard currency for [...]
Wall Street Blues
I’ve been sharing a lot of these posts (along with my oh-so-witty commentary) through my Google Reader feed (why haven’t you subscribed yet?), but a recent question posed to me by Lester about what has been going on in Wall Street has inspired me to make this — a list of blog posts/news articles/comics/commentary from [...]
Goodwill hunting, the financial crisis sequel
A while back I posted about something called “goodwill” — an accounting term which means very little but, by accounting standard practice, shows up on corporate financial statements. If you can’t tell by my tone of voice, I don’t put a lot of stock in the concept of "goodwill". Much to my dismay, I discover [...]
Playing with Monopoly
With the recent challenges to Google’s purchase of Doubleclick, Microsoft’s endless courtship of Yahoo, and the filing of more papers in the upcoming Intel/AMD case, the question of "why should the government break up monopolies?" becomes much more relevant. This is a question that very few people ask, even though it is oftentimes taken for [...]
Windfall Profit Taxes and Windmills
Gas prices are going up. Believe me, my wallet is well aware of this as I not only live in the Bay Area, but my weekly commute is over 200 miles. And if I’m feeling the pinch, people around the country probably are as well. Not surprisingly, there has been a lot of steam [...]
