The Sector Financial Balances Model of Aggregate Demand—Revised – Scott Fullwiler
A great but dense analysis of the 1990s expansion and the present fiscal crisis

Hotter weather fed growth of Incan empire – New Scientist
Incan and Mayan history is fascinating

South Korean Consumer Confidence Rises to a Seven-Year High – Bloomberg.com
Yet more evidence of de-coupling

Clive Crook – Obama [...]

We’re not really hard wired for making money in the markets. We use a lot of gut instincts, heuristics and plain illogic in making decisions.  The result is sub-optimal investment performance. This is the nothing new as the field of behavioral economics has really moved to the forefront of academia with Daniel Kanheman receiving the [...]

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has a good piece on Iceland out today at the Telegraph. The main point of his article is that Iceland is emerging from crisis and depression in a relatively healthy state due to a fifty percent currency devaluation.  While, GDP will shrink by 7% this year in Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Estonia and many [...]

Bernanke: 25 mega-firms are systemically vital – MarketWatch
That’s a lot more than the biggest banks we hear about

Economist’s View: From 1983: Health Care Reform in Canada
Echoes of the debate today in the US

Eliot Spitzer: "The Federal Reserve Is A Ponzi Scheme" – Dealbreaker
Watch this video

Steven Gerrard cleared … – Guardian
Bill Maher: New Rule: Not Everything [...]

In truth this is really two failures, but one had six subsidiaries so it counts as seven.  Here are the failures:
The first bank is in New York. Waterford Village Bank, Clarence, New York, was closed by the New York State Banking Department, with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as receiver. Evans Bank, N.A., Angola, [...]

This is an astonishing video in China with Hugh Hendry, the money manager who is bearish on China who I profiled earlier this month.  In it, he shows us building after building after building – all of them massive and all of them empty.  And you see yet dozens of others still in construction in [...]

Citigroup has just released a forecast which is very troubling in regards to employment and growth in the Spanish economy.  With unemployment already having hit 17.9%, Citigroup expects layoffs to increase this to 22% in 2010.  Below is my translation of the Spanish-language article in Finanzas.
The stabilization that the Spanish labour market seems to have [...]

The data being reported out of Asia is in marked contrast to what we are seeing in Europe and North America.  Last week, I noted that Singapore had put up big numbers.  China is also expanding robustly. Compare that with the data coming out of Europe like the UK growth numbers released today and you [...]

In the just finished second quarter of 2009, the UK economy was contracting a massive 5.6% from the year ago period.  This is the worst performance since records began in 1955. What’s more, the data surprised to the downside, with the quarter-on-quarter contraction coming in at 0.8%, much worse than the 0.3% contraction which had [...]

Stop And Smell The Flowers — The Scent Really Can Soothe Stress
Japanese scientists have shown this.

Comment: Why people don’t act on climate change – New Scientist
"People’s attitudes towards climate change, even Pope’s, are belief systems constructed through social interactions within peer groups. People then select the storylines that accord best with their personal world view. [...]