October 2009

Every time I hear the word ‘bureaucrat’ used to make a point for or against government’s role in the economy, I cringe. I see this label as unfair and dehumanizing. I grew up in Washington , D.C. where my parents and their friends rose…

Annaly Capital Management’s blog has a good piece up on foreclosures, inspired by yesterday’s Case-Shiller data (hat tip Scott). If you missed it, The S&P/Case-Shiller index showed a pretty steep 1.2% month-on-month increase in U.S.…

This comes via the NYTimes: To the Editor: Re “Volcker’s Voice, Often Heeded, Fails to Sell a Bank Strategy” (front page, Oct. 21): As another older banker and one who has experienced both the pre- and post-Glass-Steagall world, I…

Nouriel Roubini seems to think so. In remarks quoted via Bloomberg, he called the enormous increase in asset prices “the mother of all carry trades.” Investors worldwide are borrowing dollars to buy assets including equities and…

The latest data from the S&P/Case-Shiller house price indices shows house prices increasing in 17 of 20 major residential markets. The overall composite index are up for the fourth month in a row but year-over-year comparisons still…

Bill Gross has a must-read piece out for his monthly Investment Outlook called “Midnight Candles.” He begins the piece with allusions to his advancing years (Gross is now 65) and the mortality he feels because of it – pretty sobering stuff.…

CyanogenMOD Hits Stable 4.2.1 Release, Reduces Home Screen Lag - Lifehacker Very good hack FT Alphaville - South Korea in a won-win situation Ex-Morgan Stanley's Stephen Jen is bullish Helicopter Crashes Kill 14 Americans in…

Steve Horwitz had an interesting read last week on Friedrich von Hayek, the Nobel Prize winning Austrian School economist. Von Hayek is best known for his 1944 Libertarian call to arms “Road to Serfdom” and is generally considered one of…

This morning, I ran across a post by Prieur du Plessis, which linked out to a Stephen Roach interview on Charlie Rose. Roach is the head of Morgan Stanley Asia and has been a voice to listen to when trying to discern where China is headed…

Marshall Auerback here with a few thoughts on money, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, and the alphabet soup of emergency liquidity facilities. The expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet has been widely misunderstood within the economics…