From the FT: A Californian hedge fund has made more than 1,000 per cent return this year by betting against US subprime home loans, making it one of the world’s best-performing funds of all time. Lahde Capital, set up in Santa Monica last year by Andrew Lahde, last week passed the 1,000 per cent mark, [...]
I’ve got a column in the new issue of Time with the brain map on the cover (or, in Europe, the inescapable mime), and online here. It begins: In July 2006, the world’s oil rigs pumped out crude at a rate of nearly 85.5 million bbl. a day. They haven’t come close since, even as [...]
Despite the apparent arrival of peak helium, they were still filling the Macy’s parade balloons with the precious gas Wednesday afternoon next to the Museum of Natural History. There were the usual brand names–Shrek, Mr. Potatohead, Pikachu. I’m pretty sure the snowman isn’t affiliated with any major media corporation, though. Neither is this Jeff Koons [...]
From a note sent out this morning by Harm Bandholz, U.S. economist for Italo-German bank UniCredit: [O]il-exporting countries have been continuing to channel the bulk of their petrodollars via London to the US … With rising oil prices, net purchases of US Treasuries made by the UK soared to USD 205 bn during the last [...]
I don’t think there’s a whole lot of reader overlap between The Corner and the Curious Capitalist, so here’s the bulk of Ramesh Ponnuru’s latest response to my response to his response to my critique of his inaugural Time column: The tax break for employer-provided coverage would stay on the books, although it would be [...]
Ultimately, what we are witnessing is a second Nixon shock played out in slow motion. And the Fed’s dual mandate ensures that John Connally’s remark from 1971 holds true today: “the dollar is our currency, but your problem.” That’s from a post by Macro Man, a trader who appears to know what he’s talking about. [...]
There’s really nothing people like reading more than blog posts about panel discussions where journalists sit around talking about blogging. (Seriously: I got some major uptake the last time I wrote one.) Anyway, I was on a panel Saturday afternoon in some kind of outbuilding of Jay Gould’s old mansion in Tarrytown, NY. The event [...]
Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Chavez have made some headlines by declaring that they’ve had it with pricing oil in dollars. Making headlines is what these two men aim to do, so in that sense their declarations were a big success. They also got the other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to agree [...]
The feedback I got on my critique of Ramesh Ponnuru’s inaugural Time column on health care was a good reminder both of why I hardly ever venture to write about about health care (it’s complicated) and why I should probably do it more often. Ponnuru made the case for a new, “radical” Republican approach that [...]
Floyd Norris has a typically Floyd Norrisish (that is to say, really good) column in Friday’s NYT: Consider how banks make money. They pay low rates on short-term deposits and charge higher rates on long-term loans. So they love what are known as positively sloped yield curves. And they like to see big credit spreads, [...]
