The Little Engine That Could?

The market is stronger today, but still hesitant after yesterday’s bear raid. Still, some important signs are encouraging for the bulls: the dollar is a tad weaker, bonds and bills are flat to lower, although notes are still strong. Certainly is wild, though - yesterday the TRIN was 6+, today it is 0.43 as I [...]

The Beat Goes On

The iTraxx Europe Crossover blew out to 936.62 yesterday, a new high according to my records, indicating a continuing deterioration in credit conditions. In other news, Governor Schwarzenegger declared a fiscal emergency. With time and money running out for California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a fiscal emergency Monday and called legislators into a new special session that [...]

Bernanke’s Delusions

Mr Bernanke has admitted that he was wrong about the effects of loose mortgage lending on the economy. He is going to have to eat these words, too: Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said Monday the current economic situation bears “no comparison” to the much deeper crisis of the 1930s Great Depression. “Well, you hear a lot [...]

It’s Official

The NBER confirms what we already knew - we’re in recession and have been since December 2007. The U.S. economy entered a recession in December 2007, a committee of economists at the private National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday. The economy reached a peak in December and has been declining since, according to the business [...]

A Bridge Too Far

When Microsoft sold out to the MPAA, RIAA and similar alphabet soups, it seems to have thought that it could stick the resulting DRM-heavy software to users without regard to its quality and usability. But Vista was so unusable that even Microsoft’s marketing power couldn’t make it stick. As a result, Microsoft may have fatally [...]

Quiet Corruption

The abuse of public position for personal gain is widespread in the United States. Inevitably, despite the best efforts of the politicians to suppress it, some of it seeps out around the edges. Be assured, this is just the tip if the iceberg, most continues unseen unless someone trips over it. Here’s one that caught my [...]

Lost Decades

An good piece from an actual economist, comparing the present situation to Japan’s “Lost Decades”. Reports that the USA government’s total financial commitments from the financial crisis now top US$5 trillion raise the obvious question “Can they afford it?”. The answer isn’t obvious. Some economists, from a range of schools of economic thought, argue that the government [...]

Idle Hands

What to do when the kids are asleep or in school, and hubby is off at the office like a good sarariman? Well, trade forex of course. Ms. Mitsui, the Sakura City homemaker, started casually, hoping to add to her teenage son’s education fund and gain a bit of intellectual stimulation. She started trading with FXOnline [...]

Good For Her

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, spoke out against the interest rate slashing which encourages excessive borrowing and punishes saving. Excessively cheap money in the US was a driver of today’s crisis,” she told the German parliament. “I am deeply concerned about whether we are now reinforcing this trend through measures being adopted in the US and [...]

The Gotrocks

Thanks to naked capitalism, I found Warren Buffett’s wonderful parable of the Gotrocks, illustrating the costs of the Wall Street parasites. To understand how this toll has ballooned, imagine for a moment that all American corporations are, and always will be, owned by a single family. We’ll call them the Gotrocks. After paying taxes on dividends, [...]