Today’s Irish Times reports the Minister for Finance as delivering comments along the following lines yesterday: There was an ideological view that certain banks should be let fail and that bondholders and investors in that bank should take the hit. However, if Governments were to allow this happen, the result would be a ‘‘staggering loss of confidence in whole economic system of a country’’ and therefore ‘‘governments have to prevent banks failing and stabilise them’’, he said. The implication of these comments is that no bondholder of an Irish bank should ever take a hit, no matter how badly the bank fails, as long as the Irish taxpayer is capable of bailing them out
Olivier Blanchard: What is needed for a lasting recovery Gillian Tett: Insight: When it comes to global banks, size matters Christina Romer Is Making Sense – The Stash Michael Berube: You start a conversation, you can’t even finish it Michael Crittendon: Sen Dodd Blasts Financial Firms For Opposing Consumer Help Conor Clarke: An Interview With Paul Samuelson, Part Two David Frum: The urgent case to reform conservatism Romer: The lessons of 1937 Romer Roundtable Stephen Kinsella: at the New School in New York, you’d want to bring a sword, bandages, and some vodka to any presentation given by an external speaker…
The ‘Falkirk Herald’, based close to Ineos’s Grangemouth facility in Scotland, is not normally the place that the blog would look for news of the potential sale of a major part of the world’s 4th largest chemical company. However, that is what happened today, when the ‘Herald’ reported that Grangemouth site manager Gordon Grant had confirmed Ineos was looking for “partners”, and “had some interest from PetroChina”
This is the first same month year-over-year increase in miles driven (April 2009 compared to the April 2008) since November 2007. Of course gasoline prices have increased sharply since April. The EIA reports that gasoline prices have increased from about $2.10 per gallon in April, to $2.70 per gallon in June – and that will probably impact miles driven.
Career Search Auditors help to ensure that the Nations firms are run efficiently, its public records kept accurately, and its taxes paid properly and on time. They analyze and communicate financial information for various entities such as companies, individual clients, and government.
Career Search Accountants and auditors help to ensure that the Nations firms are run efficiently, its public records kept accurately, and its taxes paid properly and on time. They analyze and communicate financial information for various entities such as companies, individual clients, and government. Beyond carrying out the fundamental tasks of the occupation—preparing, analyzing, and verifying financial documents in order to provide information to clients—many accountants also offer budget …
Career Search Accountants and auditors help to ensure that the Nations firms are run efficiently, its public records kept accurately, and its taxes paid properly and on time. They analyze and communicate financial information for various entities such as companies, individual clients, and government. Beyond carrying out the fundamental tasks of the occupation—preparing, analyzing, and verifying financial documents in order to provide information to clients—many accountants also offer budget …
Susie Madrak: Obama to Strip Fed of Power to Regulate Mortgages, Credit Cards | Crooks and Liars Bright Rights: Reminder when reviewing Obama’s financial reform plan Nina Hachigian: Bailing Out the Bailer-Outer: Five Reasons Congress Should Agree to Fund the IMF Conor Clarke: An Interview With Paul Samuelson, Part One Trevor Giffrey: Pat Buchanan: For Affirmative Action Before He Was Against It Bruce Bartlett: The Achilles’ heel of health care reform Jon Cohn: Deep Brain Stimulation… isn’t exactly an American innovation. If anybody deserves credit for developing it, it’s the French–and one French doctor in particular…
From DataQuick: Southland median sale price inches up for first time since ‘07 Southern California home sales rose for the 11th consecutive month in May as sales of $500,000-plus homes started to come back. The median price paid increased slightly from the prior month for the first time since July 2007, the result of a shift in market activity where sales of deeply discounted foreclosures waned and mid- to high-end purchases rose , a real estate information service reported. emphasis added Yesterday I noted that Cramer was fooled by the rise in median prices (as reported by NAR)
Owners’ equivalent rent (OER) is a major component of CPI (23.8% of CPI, see Cleveland Fed ), and even though rents are falling in most areas, OER is still increasing (up 2.1% Year-over-year and up 1.8% annualized in May). For a discussion from the BLS of rent measures see: How the CPI measures price change of Owners’ equivalent rent of primary residence (OER) and Rent of primary residence (Rent) The expenditure weight in the CPI market basket for Owners’ equivalent rent of primary residence (OER) is based on the following question that the Consumer Expenditure Survey asks of consumers who own their primary residence: “If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished and without utilities?” So far owners believe that rents are still increasing.
A Wall Street Fairy Tale – THE WEEK : The story we tell ourselves about what happened to the financial markets last fall is vitally important. It will determine what form financial market regulation takes in the next few decades, and how vulnerable we will be to the next disruption. At this moment, a relatively calm one, a fictional version of last fall’s events is gaining traction
Facing a historic national debt that President Obama correctly characterized as “unsustainable,” yet still desiring to implement some sort of national health-care package, US policymakers, notably Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, have recently hinted at the possibility of a national sales tax. More specifically, they hint at possible implementation of a national value-added tax (VAT) which would tax at a certain rate the difference between the cost of inputs and the price of the output along each individual step of production.
“To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.” — Paul Krugman in 2002 I think of Paul Krugman as the great Naked Emperor of the economics profession, and when I listen to the good professor as I did today to his Robbins Lectures , I can’t avoid picturing the man naked and alone stammer out the words I’m hearing in his nervous “crazy man” voice.
Author Walter Jon Williams says that he has an unimportant problem toay: Angel Station: Watching My Uncompleted Novel Go Down in Flames : There is a scene just like this in the novel I’m working on. My whole novel is playing itself out before my very eyes. All its specialness and wonderfulness, coolness and invention is curling up and dying in fire, as if one of the incendiaries from Fahrenheit 451 found it before I could even finish it
Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta of the Washington Post news staff hoist the jolly roger and fire back at the mendacious and incompetent Washington Post editorial page: About Those Iran Polls – Behind the Numbers : Public opinion surveys are central to the Iranian opposition’s argument that the elections there were rigged for incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…. Now a competing poll conducted by two American groups is being used as part of the pushback. In an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty write up the results of their telephone poll carried out in mid-May, showing Ahmadinejad ahead “by a more than 2 to 1 margin – greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election.”…
Sheldon Richman notes in IP Debate Breaks Out at FEE that “At a recent FEE seminar, a debate over intellectual ‘property’ broke out spontaneously among Ivan Pongracic (second from right), Paul Cwik (second from left), and me (left, where I belong). Who won?” There is no doubt that in just 10 short minutes Richman completely dominates with his clear and concise thinking on this issue (as he did in Sheldon Richman on Intellectual Property versus Liberty ). Pongracic and Cwik just re-hash the standard arguments, which are full of holes (as Cwik did in his presentation at the 2008 Austrian Scholars Conference , on the IP panel on which I was a discussant; Cwik’s argument was incredibly weak (as several audience members noted to me), as the IP argument has to be).
Three adult turkeys and twenty-one poults make their way up the hillside at dawn… I am told that the California wild turkey was hunted to extinction in the 1920s–”Ma! Get a net!” These are Texas wild turkeys, and are animals that are neither “native” nor “non-native” but rather “near native.” I think that their edge over other ground-birds in American suburbia is that they do not fear cats much…
The Canadian state has, once again, resorted to murdering its own citizens to protect its vaunted monopoly over health care services and pharmaceuticals: Cancer patients desperate enough to order cheaper, unlicensed versions of the drug thalidomide from Mexico now face another challenge to getting treatment: Federal authorities have reportedly begun seizing supplies of the life-extending medicine at the border. “Health Canada is stopping every single box of thalidomide,” said an official with a Mexican company that makes the pills, who asked not to be named
For Mises’s friends of his later years, after his marriage and the success of his American activity had softened him, the sharp outbursts in the following memoirs, written at the time of his greatest bitterness and hopelessness, might come as a shock. But the Mises who speaks from the following pages is without question the Mises we knew from the Vienna of the twenties; of course without the tactful reservation that he invariably displayed in oral expression; but the honest and open expression of what he felt and thought
Charles Platt, author and journalist, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts what it was like to apply for a job at Wal-Mart, get one, and work there. He discusses the hiring process, the training process, and the degree of autonomy Wal-Mart employees have to change prices. The conversation concludes with a discussion of attitudes toward Wal-Mart.
Rohan Maitzen writes: Musical Versions : I was recently reminded of the Kate Bush song “Wuthering Heights.” I’ve learned, through the very scientific methods of chatting with friends and reading responses to posted videos on Facebook, that the song is haunting to some, unpleasantly whiny to others, and just plain weird to still others (actually, I expect all Kate Bush songs evoke at least this wide a range of responses). As it happens, I like “Wuthering Heights”…
Here is an interesting short discussion on reusing mall space from Rob Walker in the NY Times Magazine: Repurpose-Driven Life Talk of American infrastructure tends to focus on inadequacies: roads that need to be repaired or widened, bridges fortified, electrical grids updated. All the more striking, then, that America’s retail infrastructure — its malls, supercenters, big boxes and other styles of store-clumping — has come to be characterized by rampant abundance. This has been a decades-long trend
By Claus Vistesen: Copenhagen I have had a nice weekend not least because I have finally received my new laptop and as the first, of many, blog entries to be typed I would like to point your attention to some recent comments made by the German finance minister Peer Steinbrueck in the context of the increasing risk of further downgrades of European sovereigns following the decision by Standard and Poor to downgrade Ireland’s debt rating for the second time in 2009. As I think a bit about what it actually is Mr. Steinbrueck is saying I cannot help but feel that our good Finance minister is perhaps feeling a bit too smug here
As always, when the central planning bureaucrats get in a jam with no way out of the mess they have planned themselves into, they turn to libertarian ideas for the answers. Libertarian ideas with a big-government twist, that is. This article in the Telegraph is astounding: “US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive.” The problem is that American cities are far too centralized and they can no longer be managed effectively by fraudulent, socialist, politically-corrupt city administrations whose financial houses are in disarray
Apropos of Time to Help the People of Iran Overthrow Their Corrupt Regime , Daniel Davies writes: “‘Help’” appears to be a verb in the “superman conditional” tense here; as in, to simply have “help the people of Iran overthrow their corrupt regime” on your “to do” list would make a lot of sense if you were Superman, or God Almighty, but anyone else probably ought to make it a bit more specific than that. Care to make any slightly more concrete suggestions? Good question! Anyone?
