Twice this week I came in to find the database that was supposed to be cranking out morning reports instead saying, “Invalid argument.” For those without any coding background, this is basically saying “The thing you want to use can’t be used that way, or maybe it doesn’t even exist.”
In a previous generation of the Click Here to continue reading.
Everyone knows that government regulations are ridicules and overly complex. But sometimes it is hard believe just how ridicules they are.
A long time ago as far as most people’s memory’s go, Japan had a major real estate bust that lead to a major economic downturn. To fight the down turn Japan’s government borrowed massively to pour a lout of concrete. Now Japan is starting to pay the price. Spiegel has the story.
China’s government thinks that it can set prices for all kinds things. From oil to currency, there is little of importance that trades freely in China. Now this fetish for control is beginning to have predictable economic affects. The Australian has the story.
We are all religious fundamentalists. Our values are not shaped by reason because reason has nothing to say when it comes to values. Nothing illustrates this like the argument over killing cats to save birds. New York Times has a detailed look at the problem.
The debacle in Florida, namely a $27 billion short-tern investment fund being frozen after the revelation it held $700 million of defaulted debt (today reported as $900 million) led to $12 billion in withdrawals, is producing a cash crisis at the government entities that hadn’t gotten their money back.
Aside from the troubles this impairment is creating in and of itself, it will feed “run on the fund” behavior if any other government-operated funds encounter similar difficulties.
I always get mad when I hear people spouting off about how the immigrants are taking away jobs from those poor blue collar Americans. Speaking as a blue collar American, I know that this is not so. There are plenty of good jobs out there for blue collar Americans; you just have to want Click Here to continue reading.
From the comment section at Calculated Risk….
You know what cracks me up though (just a final word on FL vs. NY?) Forbes just listed Binghamton N.Y. as one of America’s hottest RE markets. Oh man I can’t get over THAT one.
It’s “hot” only because you won’t lose your shirt on a house you bought there last year…!
Since “Dale” is someone who is unknown to me, I had to check this out. I could not find the Forbes article that he mentioned online, but I did find this article that seems to back up his claim. It mentions a Forbes article and it shows that prices in Binghamton have gone up almost 20 percent since last year. That puts Binghamton in second place (just under Salt Lake City) in terms of real estate appreciation over the last year.
Who would have ever thought that Binghamton’s real estate market would one day do better then almost every where else in the country?
Megan McArdle ran a post entitled Demography is Destiny today. I was happy to see it. For some reason I had her pegged as part of the “Demographics don’t really matter” group because of some posts that I saw go up on Free Exchange. Recent posts at her new site have demonstrated that I was Click Here to continue reading.
Brad Setser calls this a scary graph. I think that fear factor is a little overdone. The graph only tracks long term flows and I think a lot of investors are parking their money in short term accounts until they figure out what’s safe and what’s not. Still, if there was a prize for dramatic drops this graph would take the prize for the year. And considering how this year went, that is saying something.
Plus, there is an implicit threat in this graph. If the fed does not start to value a sound currency then it is going to have to find 200 billion extra dollars a quarter to keep the US afloat.
Shake those cobwebs out of your head and try to imagine this:
If we are pretty well sure that we shipped something and the customer says they didn’t get it, then we have to go beat up the trucking companies for compensation. Only we are too busy getting beat up by other customer who want us Click Here to continue reading.
Calculated Risk and Tanta have been on the war path. They are fed up with people who talk about the current problems as being sub prime problems. This is a pretty sick example of why they don’t think that the current problems should be blamed on poor people.
Is a newspaper doing its job when it presents two sets of statistics as being fact in the same article when the two figures are mutually exclusive? Felix Salmon points out that the reporting on the Black Friday sales just does not add up.
The Fed is taking more steps to bail out the banks. I guess this a sub prime problem because people who are sub prime don’t get the bail out.