Yesterday I posted a chart comparing the intended Federal funds rate set by the Federal Open Market Committee with the actual average interest rate that U.S. banks are charging each other for overnight loans. Since early August, the actual rate has been substantially lower than the intended one. It turned out CondeNast Portfolio blogger …
I’ve got a big article about the real estate slump online and in the new issue of Time, which inexplicably features presidential candidates’ spouses on the cover instead of, well, real estate (although I’ll admit that the scoop about Bill and Hill loving Grey’s Anatomy is bigger than anything I came up with). It begins:
The housing
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Everybody’s waiting to see if the Federal Open Market Committee decides to cut interest rates on Tuesday. But as the chart below shows, the Federal funds rate has already more or less cut itself:
I’m not entirely sure what the significance of this is. I imagine it’s a function of the guys at the open market desk at the Federal Reserve …
Greg Mankiw links to this paper (warning: pdf) by Washington University economics grad student Charles Courtemanche (he says on his Website that he’s on the job market), who contends:
that an additional $1 in real gasoline prices would reduce obesity in the U.S. by 15% after five years, and that 13% of the rise in obesity between 1979
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The Project for Excellence in Journalism has done an interesting, if not particularly surprising, analysis of the “news agenda” of user news sites like Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us (via Romenesko). Among the findings:
The news agenda of the three user-sites that week was markedly different from that of the mainstream press. Many of the
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Mrs. Curious Capitalist, talking yesterday about the paralyzing injury to Buffalo Bill Kevin Everett, wondered if someday football would retreat to the sidelines of American sports, its terrible health consequences for so many players ruling it out as a game for with appeal for regular folks. After all, boxing used to be the most popular …
This just in from the W$J:
Mohamed El-Erian, head of the company that manages Harvard University’s $35 billion endowment, is resigning from that position to return to Pacific Investment Management Co.
Mr. El-Erian will start at Pimco in January as the Newport Beach, Ca.-based firm’s first co-Chief Investment Officer and Co-Chief
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Merrill Lynch’s Richard Bernstein is one of the few investment strategists on Wall Street whose writings are worth paying close attention to. Back in January, for example, he wrote this about how financial markets would eventually be shaken from their complacency:
We view financial risk much like popcorn popping in a microwave. Until the
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Felix Salmon really hates entertainer/economist/half-informed-pontificator Ben Stein’s column in the Sunday New York Times business section (actually, I suspect that there’s a love/hate thing going on there, but whatever). This Sunday, Stein wrote:
Owning your own home is generally considered the bedrock of the American dream, so this is
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Harvard economist Martin Feldstein is calling it quits after 30 years of running the National Bureau of Economic Research. I think this is a really big deal: Feldstein took over a mostly moribund NBER in 1977 and established it as possibly the most important arbiter–certainly more important than any one academic journal–of what …
Back in July, in Countrywide Financial’s quarterly earnings conference call, CEO Angelo Mozilo uttered these memorable words:
Nobody saw this coming. S&P and Moody’s didn’t see it coming, but they simply just downgrade bonds, they don’t take hits. Bear Stearns certainly didn’t see it coming. Merrill Lynch didn’t see it coming. Nobody saw
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I know that mocking the nation’s real estate trade organizations for their perpetual sunny optimism in the face of bad news has been getting mighty fashionable lately–maybe too fashionable. But this little item from the National Association of Realtors’ house publication is just too precious to ignore:
University of Florida study
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