In the Greek bailout episode the Greek government has been behaving much like the self-pitying Antonio from “The Merchant of Venice,” while the EU has been posing as a rather heavy-handed Shylock. Despite being aware of the damaging consequences of a Greek default and...
Yesterday's IMF report on China "praised China's leaders" for responding quickly to its recent economic slowdown and concluded that "China's economy seems to be undergoing a soft landing, though...
The entire bit is good, but the really good part begins about 3:30 into this video from last Thursday's "Colbert Report."The Colbert Report Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor &...
There are a few things that make me really hot under the collar. The first is the unending 100+ degree summer heat in central Texas. The second is the unending debate on the "state of the field", in...
Morgensen's and Rosner's new book appears to have breathed new life into claims that responsibility for the housing bubble can be laid at the feet of Democrats, ACORN, and Fannie and Freddie. Given that buyers of the book at Amazon are also snatching up works by Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Andrew Breitbart, I'm pretty sure that it is on its way to becoming the housing-bubble bible for all those who also are learning how Constantine's conversion to Christianity and the Battle of Poitiers were key "tipping points" in the history of human freedom.It strikes me as unlikely that a closer...
From NMA – those who brought you the Tiger Woods Video, and the USA-China Currency Crisis Rap Battle video comes the Ireland Bailout video (which I can't make fit in the frame! Edit: Fixed!)As an IR blogger with an interest in econ, you might be interested in this animated take on Ireland's current state of financial distress. I can't vouch that a leprechaun really charged into Biffo's office as he was taking in a Guiness, but we tried our hardest to condense the situation in less than two minutes.Please watch it if only for the signs the protesters are holding at the end.Despite the email,...
I'm fascinated by the narratives of the financial crisis that basically cast it as a mass deception. Clearly we need to develop a scale of deceptive practices and think about how this all relates to the social construction(s) of reality(ies). At the simple end there are the flat-out lies, for example those told by the peddlers of certain types of mortgages, but things quickly get more complicated. There are the accounting tricks used by big banks to understate their risk exposure (for example, a Wall Street Journal headline on April 9, "Big Banks Mask Risk Levels", tells much of that story)....
A friend writes,* "What the end of hegemony looks like..."In another indication that China is growing increasingly concerned about holding huge dollar reserves, the head of its central bank has called for the eventual creation of a new international currency reserve to replace the dollar.In a paper released Monday, Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, said a new currency reserve system controlled by the International Monetary Fund could prove more stable and economically viable.A new system is necessary, he said, because the global economic crisis has revealed the...
Baseball's winter meetings start today in Vegas, which means loads of hot-stove league excitement for baseball fans like myself. However, I don't expect my team to make one of the marquee deals, those big money contracts are usually the province of the big market, big money teams like the Yankees, Mets, Sawks, and Angles.The art of rooting for a small market team is to understand how to do more with less, and, most importantly, how to minimize risk in the land of free-agent mega-contracts. If you're the Yankees, you can sign a Carl Pavano, say, to a 4-year, $40 million contract, and when...
Many years ago, I attended a talk by Michael Shapiro. He was doing something on memory and place, and showed a clip from some Steve Martin movie--Father of the Bride, maybe II--and a colleague of mine, ever the concerned young scholar, said Yes, but Professor Shapiro, over in Bosnia (which was going on at the time), people are dying, and here you are showing movies. What does this tell us that we should do to stop that?And he replied: Who is this "we"?In his current column, Paul Krugman channels his inner pomo and opens with a similar story:A few months ago I found myself at a meeting of...
Michael Lewis's account of the collapse of Wall Street is a must read for insight and understand of what was going on that led to the current mess.I know it won't, but it should, end this foolish notion that markets are self-organizing, self-regulating, rational entities where rational actors maximize value and where self-interested firms don't lie, cheat, and steal. Markets are social entities, perhaps best studied as networks governed by certain rules and norms--and those rules and norms read more like and MBA textbook than an Econ textbook. The implications of that are, I think, quite...
One thing that has been bothering me of late in the Presidential debate is how the press and the public are asking the wrong questions of the candidates about the economy. While part of it may be symptomatic of a general lack of understanding as to what is going on, it also betrays an intellectual laziness in those covering and discussing the campaign. Wedded to tired lines of debate, these questions rehash what we think is important and distract from the development of an understanding of the current state of affairs which has very little relationship to the ancien regime.Two general areas...