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This commentary in the Financial Times from Byron Wien, the former Morgan Stanley guru, is spot on. Everyone making a decision to vote for President in the U.S. should heed Wien’s word before pulling that lever.
America’s decline will not be easily reversed
By Byron Wien

Having grown up in an America where the opportunities seemed endless, [...]

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This is big news from Clive Crook at the Financial Times.

The response in the U.S. to startling new allegations that the White House directed the forgery of evidence to support its case for the war in Iraq has been surprisingly muted so far. The charges may be false, of course, but if they [...]

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On Friday, Bloomberg quoted a former LTCM partner as saying the $1.9 trillion hedge fund industry faces “much worse” conditions than in 1998, when Long-Term Capital Management LP collapsed.

“It’s definitely a trickier environment. The market is much worse that it was in 1998. Then it was just LTCM, but this impacts everybody.”
-Hans Hufschmid, former partner [...]

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I’m getting a lot of mail about the Rosenberg post and my mea culpa on inflation. To be blunt, a lot of you think I’m out to lunch and Rosenberg is too — after all inflation is over 5% and that’s just the bogus CPI measure our governments release.
But, alas, there is method to [...]

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After RBS’s writedowns on Friday, Bloomberg estimated that we have had nearly $500 billion in writedowns in the so-called ’sub-prime’ crisis to date.
Barclays, Britain’s third-biggest bank, had first-half writedowns of 2.8 billion pounds, it reported yesterday. Its net income declined a less-than-estimated 34 percent to 1.72 billion pounds in the first six months of the [...]

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For much of the past year I have been a critic of the Fed for keeping rates in easy money territory. One major reason was that they were going to let the inflation genie out of the bottle and that was going to be a problem.
Now, I feel like inflation was only ever a [...]

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Another blurb on David Rosenberg of Merrill Lynch, this time from the Globe & Mail in Canada where Rosenberg is from. This one is more about Merrill and its culture than Rosenberg. The paper points out the irony of Rosenberg being the Chief North American economist at one of the hardest hit financial services [...]

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This is a transcript from the Nightly Business Report interview with David Rosenberg last night. He has consistently been one of the best economic commentators on Wall Street during and after the bubble. His comments regarding consumption, a second stimulus package, inflation and the Fed should be noted.
I take his comments on the [...]

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Ben Smith has a good column on McCain’s bellicose response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Even George W. Bush has shown more statesmanship here.
‘Invasion of Georgia’—a ‘3 a.m. moment’
When the North Caucasus slid into war Thursday night, it presented Senators John McCain and Barack Obama with a true “3 a.m. moment,” and their responses [...]

This chart from the New York Times demonstrates visually what happens when the Fed lowers interest rates too much: it skews simple economic decisions like what type of mortgage product to use, often with unintended consequences.

Similarly low rates on adjustable rate mortgages enticed buyers into the housing bubble.