Author Archives: Felix

Krugman’s lost it today, with a bizarre column which would makes Michiko Kakutani on a bad day look sensible. Not only is it all predicated on a silly conceit (“if we’re going to have a crisis, here’s how”), but he … Continue reading →

Just in case you thought that US housing prices were falling: er, not so much. Kash Mansori has the details, but suffice to say that the US House Price Index rose by 5.9% in 2006, and by 1.1% in Q4. … Continue reading →

Never mind those inflation calculators you find all over the internet — Free Exchange and Brad DeLong both have posts up today asking pointed questions about what yesterday’s money can buy today. First Brad DeLong, resuscitating an old post of … Continue reading →

Al Gore and I both try to offset our carbon emissions. Are we actually making things worse when we think we’re making things better? The Economist and Tyler Cowen both try to make the case, and both are quickly slapped … Continue reading →

Adventures in private equity: Remember how the Blackstone bid for EOP — at the time, the biggest private-equity bid ever — was quickly topped by another bid, from Vornado? Well, the same thing might happen to KKR’s bid for TXU. … Continue reading →

Austan Goolsbee wonders in the NYT today why billionaires don’t give more of their money away, given that they can’t spend it (there’s just too much of it to spend) and that even their children can’t realistically spend it either: … Continue reading →

Should we care about what the markets did on Tuesday? The news made the front page of just about every newspaper in the world, so it’s clearly important, right? Well, let’s keep things in perspective. Here’s a stock chart for … Continue reading →

Have you read that Michael Pollan article on nutritionism yet? You really should. Here’s a chunk: Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, an approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. … Continue reading →

You can bet on people dying: Liam Pleven and Ian McDonald in the WSJ have a good overview of how life-insurance companies are increasingly turning to the capital markets to hedge the risks they bear of insured individuals dying too … Continue reading →

According to a rumor over at Dealbreaker, one of the big losers in the subprime mess is none other than Goldman Sachs: “Not sure if this is on your radar, but a Goldman trader took a $1B (yes, that is … Continue reading →

“If it walks, ducks and quacks like garbage it passes the smell test of being garbage.” —Nouriel Roubini

The WSJ had a wonderful Reply-All (think a techy version of Econoblog) yesterday on the subject of whether the XM-Sirius merger would be good for consumers. Mark Cooper, a consumer advocate, said no; Donald Russell, a former DoJ lawyer, said … Continue reading →

Here’s the chart of yesterday’s price action in the Dow, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq. Note anything crazy? Like a whopping great big down-250-points-in-one-tick plunge in the Dow at about 3pm? As you can see from the broader stock … Continue reading →

Remember last week, when the world was carefree, and all we had to worry about were minor things like the fate of the planet? David Leonhardt’s Economix column bravely entered the world of discounting — and managed to get it … Continue reading →

Brad Setser says that “I thought Leonhardt was better than usual” today — and he’s right. David Leonhardt’s Economix column comes on a Wednesday, which is perfect timing to look at the economic fundamentals, insofar as there are any, behind … Continue reading →

Dan Gross gets it. Andrew Leonard gets it too. In fact, any halfways-decent financial journalist gets it, and, if honest, would simply write a story saying “the market went down and we don’t know why”. But instead we’re inundated with … Continue reading →

It seems that no one has a pleasant word today for Moody’s, except maybe investors in Icelandic bank bonds. The ratings agency went on a triple-A spree yesterday, bringing pretty much every Icelandic bank up to Aaa status. Landsbanki was … Continue reading →

Steven Johnson explains today why he ended up accepting money for his Web 2.0 venture from VCs: The assumption had always been that we would not seek out venture capital funding for the company — at least in its first … Continue reading →

I’m slowly becoming convinced that 95% of talk about negative equity comes either from anecdote or from extrapolation, and that there are actually few if any reliable statistics on how much negative equity there really is in the US. But … Continue reading →

So Chinese stocks fell by 9%, Alan Greenspan uttered the word “recession“, US stocks are down, credit spreads are widening, and emerging-market bonds are being hit. It’s time to take a step back. The Intrade recession contract is at an … Continue reading →

Robin Hanson asks for disagreement case studies. When I was at RGE, I developed a bullish, trust-the-market persona to act as a foil to Nouriel Roubini’s ultrabearish position. Brad Setser was kinda in between. The interesting thing to me, which … Continue reading →

TXU is one of the most environmentally unfriendly companies in the world, and the enormous amount of bad press that it’s been getting as even spilled over onto banks such as Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley. Now, of course, … Continue reading →