Archive - Apr 1, 2010 - Blog entry

Today we will be getting the BLS numbers on jobs which everyone says will be great. Will it be good or bad news? The problem is that many of these "jobs" aren't jobs. The needle isn't budging.

Weather is like monetary policy. Extremes are bad.

I'm not against derivatives - including credit default swaps. But keeping them secret and hidden is a recipe for disaster ...

Legislation to ban commissions paid to intermediaries for steering California's public pension money to investment houses has spurred a lobbying war led by Wall Street's powerful Blackstone Group, allied with such major banking firms as Wells Fargo & Co. Who will come out ahead?

Desire to become global superpower driven by underlying principle that the world lacks enough supply of natural resources to prolong the existence of every sovereign nation over the long run.

Isn't that like Charles Manson saying murder is "deeply unfair"?

What makes blogs useful? How can we make them more useful? Part 2 of 2.

Supply of course. We just haven't come to fully appreciate that, yet.

The uptick in unemployment is directly correlated to the extreme tightening in credit standards we've seen over the past year or so. The environment of lax credit "easy money" we experienced over the past several decades artificially inflated the perceived purchasing power of households by most likely several magnitudes.

Over the last ten years, the Renminbi (RMB) or yuan, has been slowly gaining influence in the markets that surround mainland China. And about one year ago Hong Kong introduced a new trade settlement that allowed Hong Kong business’ to use the RMB as a trading currency. In a China Daily interview, Dr. Billy Mak, Associate Professor in Finance at Hong Kong Baptist University believes the yuan overtaking the dollar will happen in three phases.

This is the skinny on the EU's Greek rescue package. The (empirical) truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the whole (empirical) truth! Moral hazard, be damned...