This contribution from Daniel Berger is a letter to Michael Smerconish in response to a commentary Smerconish wrote on 10 May 2009 in the Philadelphia Inquirer “Head Strong: Did Hollywood inspire the meltdown men?” A shorter version of Berger’s piece appeared at New Deal 2.0 in July.
Given my recent two posts on greed (“More on [...]

The following post is a re-post from Rick Bookstaber’s blog. Bookstaber is a market veteran who has long and storied history of achievement. He worked at Bridgewater Associates, ran the Quantitative Equity Fund at FrontPoint Partners and was in charge of risk management at Moore Capital Management amongst other things.
A tenet of economics is that [...]

We received word today from the British government that GDP in the UK contracted for a record sixth quarter in Q3 2009. I like Neil Hume’s headline on this one, “GDP shock flop.”

John Gapper had a good piece in the FT yesterday called “Goldman should be allowed to fail.” His conclusion is that Goldman is allowed to game the system. It is a broker-dealer masquerading as a bank. It takes on much more risk than a traditional bank. It engages in different activities. It compensates its staff [...]

The title of this post is somewhat misleading – designed to be provocative to get you to read what I have to say. Indeed, I am going to defend Goldman Sach’s right to pay what it likes to its employees. But, I am also going to defend your right to be outraged and to look [...]

Further proof that the reflationary efforts of policy makers is taking hold comes from London in the form of record high house prices.  The Guardian reports:
Property asking prices in London have broken through the record high set in November 2007 as the drought of homes for sale around the country continues to distort the market. [...]

Roger Bootle sat down with the Telegraph and ran through a few themes in regards to the stock market, the financial crisis, government debt, currencies and compensation in the financial sector.  He has a lot to say, in particular on banks, which he argues do not operate in competitive markets – one reason they pay [...]