Monthly Archives: May 2007

Gasoline: Going Up, But Still Cheap

Dutch gasoline is double the price in the US.
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Posted in climate change | Comments Off on Gasoline: Going Up, But Still Cheap

When Can Securitized Mortgages Be Modified?

Helping homeowners whose mortgages are owned by bondholders.
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Posted in bonds and loans, housing | Comments Off on When Can Securitized Mortgages Be Modified?

Bob Merton Sees No More Market Panics

Bob Merton seems to believe that panics can’t or won’t happen any more, because certain events (Amaranth, the GM and Ford downgrades) didn’t cause a panic. That’s silly.
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Posted in derivatives | 4 Comments

African Nations Need to Grow Up

It boggles the mind that Africa’s diplomats and politicians, who have been agitating for years to have more ownership of development programs on their continent, would turn around and nominate Zimbabwe as the chair of a development committee. It’s almost as though they want to prove to the world that they simply don’t care about murder, corruption, poverty and famine.
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Posted in geopolitics | Comments Off on African Nations Need to Grow Up

Welcoming George Borjas to the Blogosphere

George Borjas starts a blog.
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Posted in economics | Comments Off on Welcoming George Borjas to the Blogosphere

No Reason to Worry About Decreasing Alternative Investment Returns

Hedge funds are essentially leaving a bottle of hot sauce on the table, rather than making all their meals equally spicy for everyone.
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Robert Shiller vs Superstar Cities

It seems there’s academic backup for my thesis
that New York City property is only going up: a paper
called "Superstar Cities" by Joseph Gyourko, Christopher
Mayer
, and Todd Sinai.
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Posted in housing | Comments Off on Robert Shiller vs Superstar Cities

How Carbon Capture can Save the Coal-Burning Industry

If Robert Murray and his fellow denialists would stop railing against the inevitable and start seeing the opportunities that an enlightened carbon policy affords them, they might go down in history as heroes, rather than villains.
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Why is Dow Jones Stock Down Today?

When a stock is trading on one utterly unknown variable — whether or not Rupert will manage to buy it — it will naturally exhibit quite a lot of volatility.
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Posted in Media, stocks | Comments Off on Why is Dow Jones Stock Down Today?

Good News on New York Competitiveness

I’m indebted to Elizabeth
Olson
for bringing my attention to a new study by Craig Doidge,
Andrew Karolyi, and Rene Stulz, on the subject
of the competitiveness of New York stock exchanges. (There’s a non-gated version
of the study here.)
According to the report, New York exchanges are actually just as competitive
as they always were, if not more so.
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Adventures in Personal Finance, Part 3: The Poor Single Mother

We’ve already seen that the middle
classes
can have more financial horse-sense than the
rich
. Where do the lower classes fit in? It turns out that they, too, can
be eminently sensible.
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Posted in personal finance | Comments Off on Adventures in Personal Finance, Part 3: The Poor Single Mother

ABN’s Brazilian Gambit

ABN Amro and Barclays have just unveiled their latest weapon in the war against
the RBS-Fortis-Santander consortium which also wants to buy ABN. And it’s quite
a clever one
.
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Paying Down the Mortgage vs Investing in the Market

Should I keep my mortgage balance high in order to invest in stocks and bonds?
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Posted in housing, personal finance | Comments Off on Paying Down the Mortgage vs Investing in the Market

Why do the Chinese Want a Blackstone Stake?

China is investing $3 billion in Blackstone. Why?
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Posted in china, stocks | Comments Off on Why do the Chinese Want a Blackstone Stake?

Adventures in Personal Finance, Part 2: The Rich Couple

Sometimes the middle classes have a hell of a lot more financial horse-sense
than the rich, even if the financial press doesn’t like to spin it that way.
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Posted in housing, personal finance | Comments Off on Adventures in Personal Finance, Part 2: The Rich Couple

Adventures in Personal Finance, Part 1: The Middle-Class Family

Sometimes the middle classes have a hell of a lot more financial horse-sense than the rich, even if the financial press doesn’t like to spin it that way.
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Jerry Falwell is Dead

This is why God invented Christopher Hitchens. (Via)

Posted in Not economics | 6 Comments

Debt Datapoint of the Day, EMBI+ Edition

JP Morgan’s EMBI+ index
of emerging-market bond spreads hit
an all-time high yesterday
, yielding just 144 basis points over Treasury
bonds.
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Posted in bonds and loans | Comments Off on Debt Datapoint of the Day, EMBI+ Edition

Derivatives and CLOs: The Scaremongering Continues

Greg
Ip
and Gillian
Tett
both have pieces today on that old friend of ours, systemic risks to
the financial system.
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Posted in derivatives | Comments Off on Derivatives and CLOs: The Scaremongering Continues

Tech Bubble Redux

The one silver lining for Microsoft, when Google bought DoubleClick for $3
billion a month ago, was that Google was suffering from the winner’s
curse
, and paid way too much for the internet advertising company. Naturally,
then, it took Redmond’s best and brightest only a few short weeks to manage
to spend
$6 billion
on their own internet advertising company, aQuantive.
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Posted in stocks, technology | Comments Off on Tech Bubble Redux

World Bank Stitch-Up to Continue

Just about any process for choosing the World Bank’s president would be better than what we have now, which is no process at all.
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Posted in world bank | Comments Off on World Bank Stitch-Up to Continue

Wolfowitz Finally Wakes up to Reality, Resigns

Talk about a lame duck. Paul Wolfowitz will resign
as president of the World Bank on June 30, a month and a half from now, during
which time he will earn $50,000, tax-free, and do substantively zero useful
work. Then again, it’s not a lot of time to find a replacement. Ngozi,
of course, has an easily-leavable job at the Brookings Institute, and she’s
in Washington already. It would be silly to look at anyone else, if you ask
me.
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Posted in defenestrations, world bank | 1 Comment

Why Venezuela Won’t be the Next Zimbabwe

Venezuela is not Zimbabwe. Yes, Hugo Chavez is making very bad economic decisions — but then again, his elitist predecessors were hardly much better. And very bad economic decisions don’t in and of themselves lead to Zimbabwe-style disaster. For that, you need a power-mad lunatic like Robert Mugabe. And while Chavez might be distasteful to many Americans, a Mugabe he is not.
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Posted in economics | Comments Off on Why Venezuela Won’t be the Next Zimbabwe

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala for World Bank President!

I doubt that Bush has the vision to nominate Ngozi. But it would be a wonderful day if he did.
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Fantastic News on Immigration

The immigration
agreement
which has been hammered out between the Senate and the White House
is some of the best news I’ve heard in ages, and I’m keeping lots of fingers
and toes crossed that somehow it makes its way into law.
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Posted in immigration | Comments Off on Fantastic News on Immigration