The real estate boom/bubble of the past few years had a lot of interesting effects on the American economy that are now being unwound. One was that everybody’s brother in law became a mortgage broker. Another was that consumer spending kept rising even though incomes were stagnant. Yet another, which I hadn’t really thought about [...]
The WSJ has a very interesting article today explaining that Ford’s main motive for thinking about selling off Volvo is the need to raise money to pay for a deal with the UAW: General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. have moved in recent months to pare assets and build up cash as they seek [...]
… I offer this scene of New York City in summer, from the Bohemian Hall & Beer Garden in Astoria, Sunday:
Three professors at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management have assembled a mathematical model to explain why it is that financial fraud increases in good times and decreases in not-so-good times. Write Paul Povel, Rajdeep Singh and Andrew Winton, in a paper in the July Review of Financial Studies: Our model highlights two [...]
At the Red Bull New York-New England Revolution game Saturday night. (The Mighty Revs won 1-0 on what the replays showed to be a beautiful Andy Dorman goal; I missed it because I was text-messaging Mrs. Curious Capitalist). Attendance wasn’t really as dire as it appears in the above photo. Presumably to make things look [...]
From today’s Volkskrant (clunky translation mine): The “milk ponds” and “butter mountains” of Europe are history. For the first time in almost 40 years, Dutch dairy farmers don’t have to ask Brussels for subsidies. Prices on the world market are rising so fast, that they can stand on their own legs… “The mood is euphoric,” [...]
Okay, I’ve read David Cay Johnston’s article about Blackstone’s funky tax avoidance plan three times now, and I’m still miles from understanding how it works. But here’s the result: The Blackstone Group, the big buyout firm, has devised a way for its partners to effectively avoid paying taxes on $3.7 billion, the bulk of what [...]
From an interview with Chicago broker/trader Jay Norris, on the currency-trading blog Piptopia: I always remembered Bill Williams -– Author of Trading Chaos — my first mentor’s answer when asked what sort of people are best to train as traders. Without hesitation, he said “Give me someone w/ the equivalent of a high school education [...]
I’ve always been a little dubious of the famous Goldman Sachs forecast about the future importance of the “BRICs” economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China. Steve Pearlstein’s column on high-tech business in Russia in yesterday’s WaPo made me a little more dubious. India and China I get. Barring disaster, they’re going to be the dominant forces [...]
Reader Tara Lazar writes: I enjoyed your recent article regarding Facebook and the social networking phenomenom. In your article you state the first of such sites was Friendster in 2002, but another service called Six Degrees was active in the mid and late 90′s. Named after the John Guare play (and subsequent movie), the site [...]
