Category: Economics

World Markets Take A Pounding – The Beginning Of The Correction?

World Markets Take A Pounding – The Beginning Of The Correction?

| January 21, 2008 | Reply

While the US took MLK day off in the markets, the other parts of the world traded into uncertainty and doubt. As a result all world indexes ended sharply lower: % Today % YTD FTSE 100 (UK) -5.48% -13.61% DAX (Germany) -6.83% -15.49% Nikkei (Japan) -5.49% -14.36% HANG SENG (China) -7.41% -13.22% Why is this […]

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Housing Price Decline – California Cities

Housing Price Decline – California Cities

| January 14, 2008 | Reply

As most of the readers here know, my team has been working with new technology to extract, refine and exploit information that is all around us. We have named that technology Boomerang and one example of it is an application called Hardtack. We are approaching the 1 year anniversary of full scale data gathering with […]

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Boomsday is coming

Boomsday is coming

| January 11, 2008 | 1 Reply

Megan McArdle, my favorite blogging economist, has a lengthy, thoughtful analysis of what the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation may mean to America: As the Boomers age, they will consume fewer of the things that we produce efficiently, and more of the things that we provide relatively inefficiently. Productivity is notoriously difficult to pro­ject, […]

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Financial Zombies – The Recession’s Walking Dead

Financial Zombies – The Recession’s Walking Dead

| January 8, 2008 | Reply

Lost in the Election and Brittany din, the cold wind of recession is starting to blow hard enough that even the mainstream media types are starting to see smell it. Worse yet the deflation triggers are continuing to fire faster and harder since Christmas. Some of the facts: The Dollar continues to weaken against other […]

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Sorting through the financial crisis

Sorting through the financial crisis

| January 3, 2008 | Reply

Unqualified Reservations is a new addition to my daily blog reading, largely because of posts like this one: A better way to think of our present financial system is to compare it to Microsoft Windows. Windows is indeed complicated. It is astoundingly, brilliantly, profoundly complicated. If there is anyone in the world, even at Microsoft, […]

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How dominant is Google?

How dominant is Google?

| December 31, 2007 | 1 Reply

Just ask Jeff Jarvis: — Google is the “fastest growing company in the history of the world.” – Times of London, 1/29/06 — Google controls 65.1% of all searches in the U.S. at the end of 2007 and 86% of all searches in the UK, according to measurement company Hitwise. — Google was searched 4.4 […]

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Drew Carey and Eminent Domain

Drew Carey and Eminent Domain

| December 18, 2007 | Reply

Drew Carey (yes, that Drew Carey) does a penetrating look at the use of eminent domain to push out established businesses for developers — and one city (Anaheim) that it taking a very different approach: Hat tip to OpinionJournal.com. ..bruce w..

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I agree: this is a creepy ad

I agree: this is a creepy ad

| December 11, 2007 | Reply

Found this on Eschaton: As Atrios said, this ad is “weird and disturbing for so many reasons.” I plan to do some investigation to find out whether Experian (“freecreditreport.com”) does indeed allow you to see other people’s credit report. ..bruce..

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Here comes the bubble, redux

Here comes the bubble, redux

| December 4, 2007 | Reply

Some months back I raised a cautionary flag over what I considered to be the excessively high valuation of VMWare (“Uh oh…Tech Crash 2.0?”). I got caught in the original (though largely unacknowledged) tech crash in the 1988-1991 time frame and so was able to see (and avoid) what is largely (if incorrectly) termed the […]

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E-Trade Rescue Package – 30 Cents On The Dollar?

E-Trade Rescue Package – 30 Cents On The Dollar?

| November 29, 2007 | Reply

Word today from MarketWatch that the CEO of E-Trade is hitting the bricks as part of a $2.55 Billion deal with Citadel to pump enough money into the online broker to keep it running in face of losses connected to their Asset Backed Securities (ABS): NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The subprime crisis claimed a new […]

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