December 2008
35 posts
It’s not hard to make money.
It’s hard to make money doing something you like.
It’s hard to make money without feeling like your fucking someone, or actually fucking someone.
It’s hard to make money in print journalism.
But money? This is capitalism! You don’t have to add value. You just gotta work the behavioral biases that make it so much easier to add perceived...
“God bless Greenspan,” the post read, “patron saint of pool skatin’.”
– Skaters Jump In as Foreclosures Drain the Pool - NYTimes.com
“Following Zimbabwe’s “You Call That an Election Crisis, Kenya? I...”
– wronging rights
Watch
“My argument is that we in business are the best equipped to handle these issues....”
– Can Carbon Credits Slow Global Warming? | Page 3 | Fast Company
“Mr McCain, once the chattering classes’ favourite Republican, refused to grapple...”
– The decline of the Republican Party | Ship of fools | The Economist
“The Democrats are employing a legal theory that has kicked around the Capitol...”
– A desperate man’s gambit. But it is California politics after all.
Q&A: What Dems are doing and what it means to Californians - Sacramento Politics - California Politics | Sacramento Bee
TPMCafe Book Club
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This week: the econoblogosphere-at-large takes on Paul Krugman in a “depression economics” cage match.
We have of course devolved to the point of definitional arguments.
“To be a Treasury official in charge of dealing with an Ecuadorean bond default...”
– Ecuador’s Small Investors - Finance Blog - Felix Salmon - Market Movers - Portfolio.com
NPR confuses me...
Recent confounding selections from NPR (paraphrased):
Youth Radio reporter’s take on the downturn (Or, what made me ask, “am really that out of the loop wrt consumerism in America?”):
“When I graduated from high school, I felt this total sense of independence. Now, being a 20 year old mother, financial stress is piling up. My supervisor was just laid off, and there’s...
California: Fiscal "Armageddon"
George Skelton (LAT’s Capitol Journal) compares it to Groundhog Day, but I think it more closely resembles the opening scene from T2: Judgment Day.
The LAO recently revised up its estimates for the budget shortfall: $41.8 billion by July 2010. (Yes, for those playing at home, that’s ~40% of the operating budget for an entire year.)
Mac Taylor, the CA Legislative Analyst —...
21st Century Public Finance
In an episode we’re calling, “The One Where Barry Ritholtz Pays for Universal Healthcare”:
1. Set up a large, well capitalized hedge fund. About $5B should do it.
2. The prospectus of the fund should note its purpose is to “Seek out profit opportunities via arbitraging inefficiencies in the markets and health care system of the United States.” Include standard “Socially...
“But in the late twentieth century something changed. It turned out that...”
– Paul Graham — technologist, co-founder of YCombinator, and damned-impressive essayist (compared to most programmers I know personally) — with a piece called The High-Res Society.
Other recent essays of his worth your time: Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession? and Cities and...
“The history of Argentina in the last 100 years is a story of great potential...”
– That’s some crisp prose on Argentine economic history, from Slate. But, alas, it was written by some schmuck freelancer who apparently just discovered the “NO HAY MONEDAS” crisis in Buenos Aires, and decided he could make a quick buck covering what I already did in such pristine...
“The BLS imputed 143,000 jobs into the establishment data over the last three...”
– Dean Baker enlightens us on how, yes, it’s even worse.
Things worth understanding in more detail: BLS’ birth/death model.
Beat the Press Archive | The American Prospect
““You want moral hazard, give control of a company to a class of people who are...”
– For the full breakdown:
Partially Hydrogenated » Blog Archive » The Moral Hazard of Underwater Stock Options
Obama transition site publishes special-interest... →
Coffee-fueled thoughts worth developing (Saturday...
Evidence on “starve the beast” mandates in budget reform: comparing effectiveness in state-government and corporate settings
California’s economic landscape: sectoral, educational, and tax/regulatory-policy variation across the state
Estimated impact of state-level legalization of marijuana on: supply (cost-structure, production levels, logistics, import/export levels), demand...
IBM Launches Microsoft-Free Linux PCs →
My take:
IT and general managers are now focused more than anything on the bottom-line: costs are king, given consumption and credit trends. Free replacements for virtually every ubiquitous Microsoft package exist. Moreover, they’ve become mature, stable, and readily available. Is mass conversion a foregone conclusion at this point? Worth investigating. (HT: Slashdot)
Unemployment: Yes, really, it's that bad.
Here’s the report from BLS. Let’s do it in bullet-point (and thus marginally-less-depressing) form:
Baseline unemployment is now 6.7% (highest level since 1993)
533,000 jobs were lost last month, the biggest loss since the mid-1970’s (if adjusted for overall population, HT David Leonhardt)
U6 — the broadest measure of unemployment, including underemployed and...
Calculated Risk: The Compleat UberNerd →
Everything you never wanted to know about any part of the mortgage-backed security (MBS) game.
3 tags
Hell on Earth: El Centro, California
Looking at the most recent unemployment estimates from the BLS can be depressing. California hit 8.2% in October, which amounts to 1.5 million people unable to find work. After reading the most recentreport, I decided to disaggregate the data a bit more, to understand the underlying dynamics. And, there, was where I found El Centro.
The El Centro, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area...
“Historian Rick Perlstein suggests that this memo is “the skeleton key to...”
– Health-Care Reform Could Kill the GOP - WSJ.com
Coffee-fueled thoughts worth developing
Short-run gains will never want for proponents; it is in the short term that self- and societal-interest can be so easily aligned. But it is the work of serious individuals to champion long-term ends, for it is these ends which the institutions harnessing personal cupidity fail the common good.
Things I direly wish to learn more about.
- Comparative corporate ownership structure (Japan, Germany, US) and top-management incentives in similar industries, across different countries; cross-reference: long-term firm performance
This post brought to you by Frustration, as well as the letter F, more generally — both of which are sponsored by the US auto industry.
On another note, did I really just hear a Saab spokesman on NPR...
“In no-arb efficient market fairy tale land, investors are assumed to be able to...”
– From the consistently enjoyable Physicist-cum-financial economist, Steve Hsu.
Information Processing: The value of trust
“But it is only readable in a rhetorical-excess-train-wreck mode, for it is also...”
– Brad Delong, on Ludwig von Mises’ Austrian tract, “Theory of Money and Credit”.
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong: When Reactionary Goldbug Austrian Plumber-Economists Attack!!
“Bigness of purpose is what separates 20th century and 21st century...”
– Silly business rhetoric, but useful.
Obama’s Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators - Umair Haque
‘Bernanke-san’ Signals Policy Shift, Evoking Japan... →
“The Bay Area Council, meanwhile, has called for the first constitutional...”
– Jesus Christ. I wanted the budget situation to spur reform, but this is… wow.
Dan Walters: California fiscal crisis spurs push for reform - Sacramento Politics - California Politics | Sacramento Bee
“The Wonk Wing: Thoughtful exploration of important policy issues by decent...”
– Blogs I Would Like to Read (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)