Author Archives: Felix

Murdoch Fails the Litmus Test

Murdoch lies to the FT.
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Posted in Media, publishing | 2 Comments

Equity Offerings, Private and Public

Increasingly, retail investors are being locked out of some of the most exciting investment opportunities in the world.
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Posted in stocks | Comments Off on Equity Offerings, Private and Public

Stiglitz on DVD

Joe Stiglitz has an engaging and eminently watchable rhetorical style.
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Posted in economics | Comments Off on Stiglitz on DVD

New Home Sales: Meaningless

When it comes to economic series, any one datapoint must be taken with a pinch
of salt. And when the datapoint is such an outlier compared to previous reports
in the series, one should discount it almost entirely. Case in point: today’s
new home sales report.
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Should the Poor Buy Property?

We simply do not know what percentage of subprime borrowers are ending up in default or foreclosure.
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How to Buy a Less Volatile Stock Market

If you want to invest in the stock market, but you are worried about the size of your potential losses, this could be a smart way to go.
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Posted in personal finance, stocks | Comments Off on How to Buy a Less Volatile Stock Market

Nuclear Energy’s Carbon Footprint

I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want: a ban on any website
citing scientific research without linking to it.
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Posted in climate change | Comments Off on Nuclear Energy’s Carbon Footprint

Calculating the Cost of Emigrating

There aren’t costs of half a million dollars or so associated with moving to mainland US from Puerto Rico. It’s just something which a lot of Puerto Ricans have no interest in doing — and given how nice their beaches are, you can see why.
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Posted in economics, immigration | Comments Off on Calculating the Cost of Emigrating

Do Hedge Fund Returns Fall as Their Assets Rise?

The total amount of money invested in hedge funds is still dwarfed by the amount of money in mutual funds and other long-only investment portfolios. The time may come when hedge funds run out of things to invest in, but I don’t see it happening for a while.
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Paying Your Mortgage With an Amex Card

Put your mortgage
payments on your Amex card
!
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Posted in housing, personal finance | Comments Off on Paying Your Mortgage With an Amex Card

Bill Downe Still Hasn’t Resigned at Bank of Montreal

A major bank like BMO has no business using a tiny Valhalla-based brokerage to do substantially all of its energy trading.
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Posted in banking, defenestrations, derivatives | Comments Off on Bill Downe Still Hasn’t Resigned at Bank of Montreal

Aw, Shucks

Market Movers has only been live for just over five weeks, and already we’ve
been nominated as "Best Economics Weblog" at the The
Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards
.
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Posted in Announcements | Comments Off on Aw, Shucks

Competitiveness and Mortgages: The WSJ Chimes In

The Wall Street Journal’s columnists have clearly reading the same things that
I have been over the past few days. Alan
Murray
today picks up on the report
showing that New York is still globally competitive, while Jonathan
Clements
looks at the advisability of having mortgage debt and investments
at
the same time
.
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Posted in housing, personal finance, stocks | Comments Off on Competitiveness and Mortgages: The WSJ Chimes In

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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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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Posted in climate change | Comments Off on How Carbon Capture can Save the Coal-Burning Industry

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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Posted in banking, M&A | Comments Off on ABN’s Brazilian Gambit