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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
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When Can Securitized Mortgages Be Modified?
Helping homeowners whose mortgages are owned by bondholders.
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Posted in bonds and loans, housing
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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
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Welcoming George Borjas to the Blogosphere
George Borjas starts a blog.
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Posted in economics
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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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Posted in hedge funds
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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
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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
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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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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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Posted in stocks
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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
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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
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Why do the Chinese Want a Blackstone Stake?
China is investing $3 billion in Blackstone. Why?
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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
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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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Posted in personal finance
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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Posted in world bank
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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
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