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Over coffee this Sunday afternoon (somehow this line reminded me of Aznavour’s “café-crème” line in La boheme) I read the reminisces of 5 former Bear Stearns executives in the New York Times. The paper had decided to visit them a year after the firm’s demise. It was a wasted 10 minutes. Like a prime-time Hallmark …
The Financial Times reported that cargo ships are being used as the storage place for new cars because: i) cars are piling up due to lack of demand; and ii) ships are idle due to lack of cargo. Two machines, expressly made for transporting commodities, are forced into a state of idleness – compound idleness, …
To study the properties of sub-atomic particles, physicists use particle accelerators to smash the atoms at high speed. The ensuring destruction creates extreme conditions in which the particles reveal new properties. The economic/financial destruction brought about by the speculative capital has likewise opened up opportunities to learn economics and finance, if only one is willing …
In Farsi, palan–with two long ‘a’s, like the French pronunciation of Sagan – is the saddle for donkeys. Saddle for horses is zeen. Zeen is a noble product, made of leather by skilled craftsmen. Palan is made of cloth and, being exclusively for donkeys, does not require much skill. In fact, you don’t really make …
Here is a news story from the Feb 12 Financial Times about the West Texas Intermediate no longer being a reliable measure of oil prices: The global market’s most important pricing benchmark, the West Texas Intermediate crude contract, was criticised yesterday for “sending mixed and misleading price signals, not only to the market but to …
Since early January, I have been working on Vols. 4 and 5 of Speculative Capital, putting hundreds of pages of disjointed writings into a recognizable manuscript form. This is the most time-consuming part of writing a book for me, where the broad outline of the book, the title and order of the chapters, takes shape. …
John Updike died at the age of 76. The newspapers were full of laudatory obituaries. He was described as “kaleidoscopically gifted”, “intuitive” and “lyrical”. Mostly though, he was remembered as a “chronicler of the American middle class,” a writer who wrote about the Average Joe. Chekhov, too, wrote about the average man, about the art …
The most telling news of the day was Treasury secretary Geithner’s promise to curb the banks’ lobbying for bailout money. “Geithner Limits Lobbying for Bailout Money”, The New York Times informed its readers. Recall that in October then Treasury secretary Paulson forced the CEOs of the banks to accept the bailout money. The Times reported: …
Among the mainstream press, FT’s Lex column offers one of the more consistently thoughtful business observations. This past Friday’s column noted that after the firing of “Mr. Fix-It” from BofA and the hiring of Parsons as the Citi chairman – both considered good news for very different reasons – the stock of both companies dropped. …
The question of why Lehman was allowed to fail had preoccupied me ever since the news reached me while on vacation. That Lehman’s was the largest bankruptcy ever – with about $630 billion in assets – did not tell the full story. Lehman was a major prime broker and one of the largest players in …