Author Archives: Felix

Don’t Invest in Hollywood

Only a fool would invest in the expectation of making a profit either
in films or in art.
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Ford’s Emotional Breakup With Jaguar

How emotional is Ford, now that it’s selling Jaguar and Land Rover?
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The Blackstone IPO, Net Worth Edition

How did Steve Schwarzman end up with so much more of Blackstone
Group than Pete Peterson?
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Lies and GDP Statistics

Statistics are at best an approximation of the truth.
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Goldman in Moscow

Goldman Sachs is a formidable force wherever in the world it operates. So it’s
likely to do well in Moscow, where it’s now announced
plans
to add another 25 bankers, at somewhere north of $5m per annum apiece.
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What Is Larry Summers Wearing?

David
Leonhardt
had an interesting profile of Larry Summers in
the NYT yesterday. Leonhardt reckons that Summers could (and probably should)
become a Democratic Henry Kissinger, intimately involved in policy decisions
despite not having an official government job.
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How to Make Money From Undrilled Oil

For $350 million a year, Ecuador’s offering not to drill for oil in the Amazon jungle.
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Inappropriate Behavior on Cable TV

The CNBC Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge is a horrible, meretricious abomination.
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Posted in Media | 5 Comments

Noise in the Markets, Treasury Sell-Off Edition

Trying to extract a signal from all the noise has become, to all intents and purposes, impossible.
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How to Deal With Rising Healthcare Costs

Should the rich get better care?
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Jeff Sachs’s Reality Distortion Field

I’m beginning to think that Steve Jobs’s famous Reality
Distortion Field
has a rival: that of Jeffrey Sachs.
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Detroit Shoots Itself in the Foot on Fuel Efficiency

With tougher standards, on the other hand, the Big Three will no longer need to worry about being out-competed on the gas-guzzling side of things, and they can invest more money in more earth-friendly cars. They should be lobbying for this bill, not against it.
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How Derivatives Traders Can Also Be Heroes

Bear Stearns out-trades John Paulson.
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The NAR Turns Bearish on Housing

With David Lereah gone,
it seems that the National Association of Realtors is becoming more bearish
in its forecasts
(if not its spin).
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Supply and Demand in the Cocaine Industry

There’s a large faction of economists who love to say that raising the minimum wage must also raise unemployment, because of the way that supply and demand curves work. I wonder what they would have to say about the cocaine situation.
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Paper of the Day: Levy and Temin on Income Inequality

Robert
Samuelson
devoted his column yesterday to a very interesting new paper from
Frank Levy and Peter Temin of MIT. For those
of us who prefer to read original papers rather than the journalism based on
them, the paper can be found here.
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Wednesday links

Links from around the blogosphere.
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Where I blog

I’ve found out of late that not everybody reads my website through RSS, and there are actually people who don’t know that the reason I’m barely blogging here is that I’m blogging as much as ten times per day over … Continue reading

Posted in Econoblog | 1 Comment

Complaining About the Immigration Points System

The immigration debate sure does throw together some strange
bedfellows
. Today, George
Borjas
and Robert
Reich
both express misgivings with the points-based system which will be
used to screen potential immigrants.
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Whole Foods – Wild Oats: Has the FTC Been at the Nutmeg?

Why does the FTC want to block this merger?
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Why The WSJ Is Not Necessarily A Wasting Asset

Michael
Lewis
has an interesting but wrong-headed argument today, saying that Rupert
Murdoch
is buying a wasting asset in the Wall Street Journal.
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Loans: More Liquid Than Bonds

There are impressive financings, and then there are mind-blowing financings. And they way that KKR is raising $24 billion to fund its acquisition of First Data definitely falls into the latter camp.
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Digital Movie Datapoint of the Day

Could it possibly be that the movie studios are making more money than ever?
Maybe even because of, rather than despite, the explosion in digital
technologies?
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Can Bondholders Make a Profit When a Company Defaults?

Trying to explain record-tight bond spreads.
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Can the Bancrofts Trust the Murdochs?

“It’s a very difficult kind thing to actually put in writing,” said Amy Mitchell, deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
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