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Monthly Archives: May 2007
Explaining the Dentist Puzzle
Why do some dentists get paid three times as much as others?
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Posted in economics
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Bernanke on Housing: No Sign of a Rate Cut
Bloomberg says that “Bernanke didn’t discuss monetary policy in his remarks,” but the speech reads very much to me as though he’s saying that the Fed is not going to cut interest rates in response to housing-market weakness.
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Posted in fiscal and monetary policy, housing
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Contemporary Art: Strength, or Frothiness?
If you look at the art stars of the last bubble – Schnabel, Fischl, Longo
– most of them are still nowhere to be seen, as far as the auction houses
are concerned. Basquiat, of course, is the exception. With the present crop,
working out who’s the Fischl and who’s the Basquiat is the real multimillion-dollar
question.
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Posted in art
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When Politicians Go Private
Giuliani’s brace of seven-figure salaries makes the $479,000 paid
to John Edwards by Fortress Investment Group seem positively
modest.
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Posted in Politics
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Is Chrysler worth -$30 billion?
The Wall Street Journal, it seems, can read my mind. No sooner do I ask
why Chrysler is going to be borrowing as much as $65 billion in new debt, than
Serena
Ng and Jason Singer do their best at answering.
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Posted in M&A
4 Comments
When a $7 Billion Deal is a $70 Billion Deal
Does anybody have a clue what kind of numbers are involved in the Chrysler-Cerberus
deal?
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Posted in M&A
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Why Economic Advisers Advise
It’s only natural that for anybody who’s never going to be elected president themselves, the next best thing would be to have real policy influence over the president – which is something you might be able to get by hitching your star to a campaign early on.
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Posted in technocrats
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News Doesn’t Matter, Dell Edition
Did Andrew Cuomo just increase Dell’s value by $2.8 billion?
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Posted in stocks
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Using Credit Cards Abroad
One of the more annoying of the world’s bank charges is the fee that banks charge you when you make a purchase on your credit card overseas.
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Posted in personal finance
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Goldman Sachs and Lord Browne
Goldman is deservedly drawing some heat for its cowardly decision to fire Lord Browne.
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Posted in defenestrations
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White House Still Well Behind the Wolfowitz Curve
The attempts
by the Bush administration to do right by Paul Wolfowitz are
touching, if laughably inadequate.
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Posted in world bank
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Lampert’s Options at Citigroup
What is Eddie Lampert intending to do with his $800 million
(or 0.3%) stake
in Citigroup?
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Posted in hedge funds, stocks
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Stock Traders and the Attention-Driven Economy
In the era of YouTube, there’s more clamor for peoples’ attention than ever before. And in the era of the Great Moderation, stocks just aren’t as exciting as they used to be. So people move on to the next thing, especially since the big money is being made in prop trading and private equity and lots of other places which are utterly off-limits to individual investors.
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Posted in stocks
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Questions for Economic Advisers
Harvard’s Greg Mankiw, an economic adviser to Mitt
Romney, notes
on his blog that Berkeley’s Christina Romer and David
Romer are economic advisers to Barack Obama; Stanford’s
Michael Boskin is advising Rudy Giuliani;
and Boston University’s Larry Kotlikoff is advising Mike
Gravel.
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Posted in technocrats
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The Bloomberg-Livingstone love-in
There was quite a love-in this afternoon between "Red" Ken
Livingstone, one of England’s most popular left-wingers, and billionaire
Mike Bloomberg
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Posted in cities, climate change
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Thomson-Reuters vs NewsCorp-Dow Jones
Murdoch’s overall approach to his media properties is undoubtedly much more interventionist than the Bancrofts would ever be, which makes his proposed acquisition much more problematic than the relatively easy tie-up between Thomson and Reuters.
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Posted in M&A, Media, publishing
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How Cities Can Help Save the Planet
This morning’s proceedings at the New
York Climate Summit were a good way to start the day: full of hope and optimism.
Rather than getting frustrated at the seeming inability of the world’s national
governments to do anything about climate change, the assembled mayors and other
municipal officials seemed convinced that, collectively, they were willing and
able to take on a large part of the challenge themselves.
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Posted in cities
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Wolfowitz Damned by Bank Board
There seems no way now that this whole thing isn’t going to become very ugly. The worst possible outcome, really, for the World Bank – unless it somehow results in a new president from a developing nation.
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Posted in world bank
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One Question for Rupert Murdoch
Do Fox News, or the New York Post, or the Sun, have editorial independence
or integrity?
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Posted in Media, publishing
1 Comment
New York Property Datapoints of the Day
The average New York City apartment has gone
up 23% in the past year
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Posted in housing
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The Epicurean Dealmaker
A great new blog.
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Posted in banking
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Can Mortgage-Backed Bonds be Restructured?
Amidst all the noise and hype surrounding the subprime mortgage market, there’s
one thing which hasn’t got a lot of press. (USA
Today, astonishingly, seems to be ahead of the curve here.) If loans have
been pooled, tranched, retranched, and sold to hundreds of investors and CDOs
and the like, what happens when the loans goes bad? How much leeway do loan
servicers have to modify loans which are owned by a disparate set of bondholders?
And what kind of mechanism exists for bondholders or ratings agencies to approve
servicers helping out homeowners in distress?
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Posted in housing
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Murdoch Takes Another Shot at Wooing Bancrofts
Dow Jones stock was trading below $52 today before news of Murdoch’s letter came out. Maybe what Murdoch really needs is a credible threat of withdrawing his offer. The problem, of course, is that nobody would believe it.
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Posted in Media
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Wolfowitz 0-1 Bloggers
Wolfowitz gossip hits the blogs, and even the Washington Post.
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Posted in world bank
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Market Inefficiencies, CDO Edition
Investment banks are making a fortune when they trade exotic instruments such as CDO equity tranches. And that the buy-side can and should be a lot more aggressive and a lot less trusting when it gets bids which seem far too low.
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Posted in derivatives
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