Interview with Bhavani Balasubramanian, Partner, Deloitte Haskins & Sells, Chartered Accountants, Chennai, June 25, 2009, 1 pm

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Has the responsibility of auditors changed over time

We’ve been busy the last few weeks putting the finishing touches on our brand new data platform and news feed and, as of today, those new features go live. Combined with the articles users like you have worked so hard on, these developments get us another step closer to being the most comprehensive, free, finance research portal on the web.Anyway, you’ll notice some big changes with the way our articles present data. Unlike other sites that simply fill your screen up with a thicket of raw numbers, the Wikinvest Data Central calls out a company’s most important metrics and displays all this information graphically

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Say Hello to the New Wikinvest Data Platform

This morning's observation from Zachary Roth that the mainline press corps has no way–in fact, regards it as a breach of ethics–to tell its readers that important political figures are likely to be lying reminded me of the other major grave deficiency of the press corps: its inability to exercise any quality control over its own members. And that reminded me of thus just-ain't-so story from four years ago: Brad DeLong's Website: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

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Hoisted from the Archives; Yet Another Gregg Easterbrook Train Wreck (Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps?)

In email, maureendowdsfriendwhodoesntwantanycredit@gmail.com writes, contra those who say, “At least Mark Sanford is sincere!”: It’s hard for me to find anything decent or honest about a politician who rejects stimulus money for a state with the 2nd highest unemployment rate in the country out of some misguided loyalty to an uncompromising political ideology. I understand the point you’re trying to make here, but there is nothing even remotely admirable or honest about putting ones narrow and misguided beliefs ahead of the livelihoods of the voters who you are nominally elected to serve.

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How Damnable Is Mark Sanford?

Stan Collender watches Obama take his responsibilities to the nation seriously: Attention All Deficit Hawks: Do You Know Where Your Veto Threats Are? | Capital Gains and Games : The White House yesterday did something that should truly warm the hearts of deficit hawks everywhere: it threated to veto the 2010 military authorization bill over two big spending issues — the F22 and the alternate engine for the F35. A little background.  Although both of these programs were questioned for years by the Bush White House, Congress kept insisting that the Pentagon spend the money anyway and the president always went along.  This year, The F22 was a target of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates …

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In Praise of Good Government by Barack Hussein Obama

From the Department of Labor: ETA Press Release: Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report : In the week ending June 20, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 627,000, an increase of 15,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 612,000. The 4-week moving average was 617,250, an increase of 500 from the previous week’s revised average of 616,750… Unemployment is still going up for quite a while…

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Americans Keep Getting Fired…

Writing at National Review , Lynne Munson argues that the state should ignore property rights when it comes to protecting “art” — in this case the notoriously ugly Third Church of Christ, Scientist building in Washington, DC. The church wants to tear its own building down. But not so fast, says Munson: It’s art that belongs to “the people”: I’m going to use an admittedly extreme example to make a point about art ownership

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Only "Rights-Obsessed" People Defend Property

Zachary Roth explains why the Washington press corps as we know it needs to vanish quickly and quietly: “There's almost no acceptable way for a mainstream reporter to explicitly tell readers that the information being put out by a powerful office-holder may be false or misleading…” And so Roth shows us that Jonathan Martin, Andy Barr, Ben Smith, the editors of Politico who send previous versions of the organization's work down the memory hole, Mike Viqueira, Chris Cillizza, Will Haygood, and Susan Davis all need to have their brains scrubbed by webloggers with bristle brushes.

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Learned Helplessness in the Washington Press Corps

On health economics: Florence Rath died only eight days later, complaining not so much of a broken thigh and a fractured pelvis as of the refusal of the doctors to obey her. “They know they can’t cure me, so why don’t they send me home?” she asked Tom every day, and he was never able to invent a plausible answer. On when life’s worth living: “If you are pregnant,” he had said, “will you have the child?” “God willing,” she had replied, and he had been glad, absurdly glad that in flying to meet his evil, grinning little man with the bayonet, he was leaving a child behind, even if it were a child with no father to care for it; a ragamuffin child dancing in the street for pennies, perhaps, but at least a child, which was better than to die and leave nothing, as though he had never been born.

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More Gems from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

GOAL: A Polk County School Board Process for Selecting Contractors that is “Fair, Equitable and Transparent” A “white paper summary” of a June 15 Meeting between Polk County Chamber of Commerce representatives and Assistant Superintendent for Facilities/Operations, Fred Murphy. Over the past 90 days a number of Polk County’s Chamber executives and their volunteer leaders have been approached by local contractors who felt the process used for selecting contractors to manage major construction projects of the Polk County Public School System was flawed and unfair

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PCSB Goal: “Fair, Equitable and Transparent”

For the enemies of freedom in general , and of the economy in particular, the recent crash has been the occasion to re-assert that markets in general, and financial ones in particular, are inherently unstable — and thus dangerous — because they are driven by irrational behaviors such as the “mimetic effect,” which, according to many experts and politicians, explains how Wall Street booms and then busts.

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Can the "Mimetic Effect" Explain Speculative Bubbles?

One point I had meant to make in yesterday’s post about job subsidies but forgot to was the following.  Beyond the fact that these programs are expensive and known to be ineffective at reducing unemployment, it remains the case that, whatever agreement the government comes to with the unions, the fiscal situation remains the same (I am discounting arguments here that these schemes pay for themselves because we know they don’t.) I doubt if the government will change its plans for the budget deficit by one cent if it adopts this plan. So if we spend €250 million (or a €1 billion) on these schemes we will undoubtedly have to find a corresponding €250 million in tax increases or, more likely, spending cuts to offset them.  These measures will themselves have a negative effect on aggregate demand and thus unemployment. This comes back to the point I made in my post on stimulus

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Job Subsidies and Stimulus

There is a consensus that the practitioners and discipline of economics have been key beneficiaries of the financial and fiscal crises.  The views of leading economists as to where we are and what we should do are widely sought across the media and within government. A conference organised at TCD earlier this week on the issue of political reform was part of a deliberate effort by political scientists to demonstrate the relevance of their discipline and the Irish Times has been publishing opinion pieces and articles drawing on the conference

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Political Science Fights Back

Here is the CRE report mentioned yesterday, from RC Analytics : Moody’s/REAL Commercial Property Price Indices, June 2009 The Moody’s/REAL National All Property Type Aggregate Index for April measures 135.31, a decrease of 8.6% from the previous month. The index now stands 25.3% below the level seen a year ago and 29.5% below the peak measured in October 2007. The index is 27.4% lower than it was two years ago.

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CRE and Residential RE Prices

Earlier today I posted some analysis of the gap between existing and new home sales: Distressing Gap: Ratio of Existing to New Home Sales (see the post for several graphs – including the ratio between new and existing home sales) Professor Brian Peterson has more (including some thoughts prices): House Prices and New versus Existing Homes Sales To get a feel for how the two series [New and existing home sales] move together, figure 2 plots the percentage deviation for each series from its mean from 1975-2008.

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More on the New and Existing Homes Sales Gap

Thecareer videos were developed and distributed by the Center for Occupational Employment Information (COEI) under a grant from America’s Labor Market Information System (ALMIS), a program of the US Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA). They are designed to provide a brief, visual introduction to the world of work for a career. The videos are public domain software and are released without usage restrictions.

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Accountants & Auditors

Hard to believe that higher taxes and more government intervention would actually hurt business, but Florida-based Hav-a-Tampa cigars , a subsidiary of Altadis USA, has been forced to close and lay off 500 employees: Several things conspired to hurt Altadis’ sales, [Altadis VP Richard] McKenzie said, including the recession and the growth of indoor smoking bans. The bans have especially hurt sales in cold-weather states, where it’s impractical to smoke a cigar outdoors in the winter, he said. However, the company attributed much of its trouble to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, a federal program that provides health insurance to low-income children.

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Taxes Fail To Stimulate Growth

From the WaPo: Not Paying the Mortgage, Yet Stuck With the Keys (ht Bob_in_MA) A growing number of American homeowners are falling into financial limbo: They’re badly behind on payments, but their banks have not yet foreclosed. The backlog of seriously delinquent mortgages, which so far affects about 1 million borrowers, is a shadow over hopes for a rebound in the nation’s housing markets. It masks the full extent of the foreclosure crisis ..

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Shadow Housing Inventory: Walked Away, but Lender Hasn’t Foreclosed

Paul Krugman Sends Us to Ali Frick Who Reportrs on Barney Frank: Think Progress: Barney Frank: GOP Thinks $2 Billion F-22 Project Is Funded By Monopoly Money : On a press call hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund this afternoon, Frank pointed out Republicans’ hypocrisy in railing against the deficit while simultaneously funding a $2 billion air force jet that has never once flown a mission in Afghanistan or Iraq. Frank said so-called deficit hawks act as though the Pentagon is funded with “Monopoly money”: I am of course struck that so many of my colleagues who are so worried about the deficit apparently think the Pentagon is funded with Monopoly money that somehow doesn’t count…

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More Republican Waste, Fraud, and Abuse: Defense Misspending Issue

The most questionable proposals in Financial Regulatory Reform– the 88-page blueprint for regulatory reform issued by the Treasury Department on June 24–concern the protection of investors and consumers from false, misleading, or “unfair” practices by the banking industry (as always, broadly construed to include the “shadow banking” industry, consisting of financial intermediaries that provide services similar to banking) and the credit-rating agencies. I shall discuss three of the proposals: that originators of mortgage-backed securities and other securitized debt be required to retain a minimum 5 percent interest in the securities that they sell; that oversight of credit-rating agencies be increased; and that a new agency be established, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, to protect consumers from making mistaken or foolish decisions regarding taking on debt, such as credit-card or mortgage debt

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Financial Regulatory Reform: III

The MBA reports : The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, was 548.2, an increase of 6.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from 514.4 one week earlier. … The Refinance Index increased 5.9 percent to 2116.3 from 1998.1 the previous week and the seasonally adjusted Purchase Index increased 7.3 percent to 280.3 from 261.2 one week earlier.

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MBA: Mortgage Rates Decrease Slightly

Chris Lehmann: Rich People Things: Steve Forbes Misunderstands Augustus, Caesar and Hannibal | The Awl Tyler Cowen: Kindle and DRM and Netflix too FT.com | The Economists’ Forum | Reform of regulation has to start by altering incentives Economist’s View: FRBSF: Fighting Downturns with Fiscal Policy Poet’s Choice By Katha Pollitt Matthew Rognlie: What’s wrong with low real interest rates? Andrew Gelman: Is it “schlocky” to compare life expectancies between countries? Paul Krugman: Two reactions to Ezra Klein Nouriel Roubini: The risks of a double-dip, W-shaped recession may be growing Matthew Yglesias: All Nonwhite Converging on Hypernegative View of GOP Iran’s Election and the Rift Inside the New America Foundation How Low Can They Go?

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links for 2009-06-24

From the SF Gate: Housing, unemployment woes leave movers shaken Sinking home prices and a weak job market have forced normally restless Americans to stay put in an uncharacteristic shift that has, among other things, clobbered the moving industry. “Property values have dropped so much people can’t pick up and move the way they used to,” said Michael Hicks, a demographer at Ball State University in Indiana who has tracked the nationwide slowdown using data from several sources, including moving companies. That industry data mirrors a Census Bureau report that looked at moves in 2008, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

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Housing Bust and Mobility

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) Another great paragraph from Turgot: It is this advance and this continual return of capitals which constitute what one must call the circulation of money — that useful and fruitful circulation which gives life to all the labors of society, which maintains movement and life in the body politic, and which is with great reason compared to the circulation of blood in the animal body. For if, by any disorder whatsoever in the sequence of expenditures on the part of the different classes of society, the undertakers [ entrepreneurs ] cease to get back their advances with the profit they have a right to expect from them, it is evident that they will be obliged to reduce their undertakings; that the amount of labor, the amount of consumption of the fruits of the earth, the amount of production, and the amount of revenue will be reduced in like measure; that poverty will take the place of wealth; and that the common workmen, ceasing to find employment, will fall into the extremest destitution. ( Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth ) (See also “Economics in 2 Paragraphs.” )

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Turgot on profit

Yesterday’s financial market action was very revealing. As Olivier Jakob of Petromatrix perceptively describes it, “liquidation on gasoline led to a correction in crude oil, which in turn pressured equity markets”. The problem is that financial markets now seem to be in circular mode: • Speculation about tighter oil markets has led to a belief in ‘green shoots’ • In turn, this has led a stunning global equity market rally since March Yet the “real economy” still seems to be stuck in recession

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Gasoline markets slip, financial markets stumble