Okay, this is gonna get wonky. Giuseppe Paleologo writes, in a comment to my post on Krugman vs. Chicago, It is not true that: “The central empirical prediction of the efficient market hypothesis, as laid out by Eugene Fama at the 1969 annual meeting of the American Finance Association, was that markets would move over [...]
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner announced today that the government’s Making Home Affordable mortgage modification program has lowered monthly payments for 500,000 homeowners, beating a Nov. 1 deadline the administration set earlier in the year. I wish Barbara were here to tell us what this means (she’s off this week). The overall goal is 4 million [...]
The weekly unemployment-insurance claims numbers are out, and the number of new claims—a seasonally adjusted 521,000—was the lowest since January. (Claims peaked in late March, at 674,000.) The four-week moving average, at 539,750, continues to trend downward as well. Good news. But man, what a slow trend! It’s like watching paint dry. Especially slow-drying paint. [...]
A reader asked, in reference to my column on the “Bond Bust Ahead,” As interest rates climb, bond prices drop. I understand that part. But, for an “investor” who owns bonds to maturity how does this translate into losses? I still get the same coupon payment and my principal at the end of the term.(Agreed [...]
Catherine Rampell has the story in today’s NYT about the growing interest in the White House and elsewhere in Washington in a tax credit to entice businesses to hire. This was discussed as part of the stimulus legislation back at the beginning of the year but dropped. Now it’s back because, while the economy seems [...]
Robert Fisk’s report in the Independent that the Persian Gulf countries are planning to stop pricing oil in dollars by 2018 and start using a basket of currencies instead has caused quite the big stir today. Gold hit a new record of $1,043 an ounce as investors worried about the future of the dollar, and [...]
My throwaway line that some people at the University of Chicago “reeeeaaaally didn’t like Paul Krugman’s article about the state of macroeconomics” has gotten so much traffic, thanks to a link from Krugman, that I feel obliged to go a bit deeper. My observation was occasioned by a conversation with a couple of mild-mannered, open-minded [...]
I’m a big fan of the monthly newsletter authored by Jim Paulsen of Wells Capital Management. You’ve got to love the fevered way he draws all over his charts (I’ve reproduced a sample at the end of this post). Then there’s his punctuation, extremely heavy on the exclamation marks and scare quotes. Finally there’s what [...]
For two days running, the NYT has given us epic explanations of how the sausage of modern American capitalism is made. First, on Sunday, came Michael Moss’s harrowing tale of where the burger that paralyzed Stephanie Smith came from: The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were [...]
I can’t believe I implied that I was done with the Belgian videos. Here we have Geike Arnaert and former professional whistler and amusement park owner Bobbejaan Schoepen, singing in their second language:
