Two of my favorite somewhat-off-the-beaten-track economic forecasters just came out with strikingly optimistic pronouncements this morning. How optimistic? The recession-should-end-in-a-couple-of-months optimistic. First was Lakshman Achuthan, whose Economic Cycle Research Institute was founded by the patron saint of Leading Economic Indicators, Geoffrey Moore. ECRI—which has had an excellent record in recent years of calling economic turning [...]
I’m starting to report a story about how the Obama Administration’s plans to save the housing market are playing out (if you have any inside information on that, let me know). One of the first things I’ve figured out is that I’ve failed to keep you up-to-date on our government’s generation of funny crisis-related acronyms. [...]
In the comments here and in his own blog, Sean DeCoursey has been pushing what he calls “distillation” as the solution to the near-total freeze-up of securitized lending: Distillation is the opposite of securitization. All the various components of the securitized debt are pieced back together into one single coherent original whole. That means instead [...]
I know we know that weekly unemployment claims bounce around a lot and that we shouldn’t freak out too much that they have, again, climbed higher. The Department of Labor does a good job of underscoring that by always highlighting the figure’s four-week moving average—which for the week ending April 18 fell by 4,250, to [...]
The attorney general of Michigan thinks that if GM or Chrysler file for bankruptcy protection, they should do so in the state of Michigan. Seems he sent a letter (PDF) to the two companies about that. This is my favorite part: I am gravely concerned about the impact of any bankruptcy filing in a jurisdiction [...]
After Citigroup and Bank of America both reported profits that were boosted perversely and dramatically (in Citi’s case there would have been no profit without it) by declines in the value of their debt and debt-related derivatives, now we get the opposite situation in Morgan Stanley’s quarterly earnings report: these results were negatively impacted by [...]
The Harvard Business Review has for the past couple of weeks been hosting a hoedown of an online debate on How to Fix Business Schools. Upon initial examination I thought it suffered a little from the usual malady of such giant group blog efforts: Lots of people saying their piece with little reference to what [...]
My book just got its first media coverage. And it’s on a Dutch financial Website. How cool is that? (The writer, Katrijn de Ronde, happened to be in New York a couple of weeks ago working on another article. She had gotten all interested in financial market theory after reading Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed, [...]
Gabriel Sherman’s New York magazine article about Wall Streeters and their pay is full of gems. But, partly because I’ve got efficient markets on the brain as I prepare to flog my anti-efficient-markets book, this passage interested me most: A few weeks ago, I had drinks with a friend who used to work at Lehman [...]
Standard & Poor’s released its latest Indices Versus Active Funds Scorecard today, and the headline result is the same one delivered by almost every study of mutual fund performance since the 1960s: Most actively managed mutual funds underperform the market. To be precise, 66.21% of actively managed domestic stock funds underperformed the S&P Composite 1500 [...]
