Kedrosky has a chart of major currencies showing only the Yen is holding it’s own, indeed rising, against the USD over the past two months.
Update, an even better chart:
Brad Setser also notes that this dollar strength was not global investors fleeing to a “safe” currency.
Net TIC flows in August (line 30) were essentially [...]
The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced if the nation doesn’t want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
No, not Bernanke; Cicero in [...]
Clearing out some of my macro notes; still keeping an eye on the banks, specifically their leverage, capitalisation and lending activity. The score so far: $501bn in write-downs, $353bn in new capital. Still $150bn worse off in terms of ability to weather further shocks than when this started. Kedrosky comments on the decreasing half-life of [...]
Kedrosky points out this site MFFAIS (It stands for “Mutual Fund Facts about Individual Stocks”. I’ll bet they didn’t have to pay much for that domain name) that crunches mutual fund holdings and cross-aggregates by stock, country, etc. Very useful.
From looking at the page for Telstra, the Australian incumbent telco, it looks as though only [...]
In Spanish they say “big eggs”, which is the name of one of my favourite ski runs at Mammoth Mountain. I suppose that sooner or later someone was going to have to do the following research. From: Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor — Coates and Herbert:
Little is known about [...]
Kedrosky points out a study showing a nonexistent connection between wealth and intelligence. Here is his chart from that study:
Now there’s a new, related study that comes to a different conclusion:
Abstract:This study analyzes the role that innate intelligence plays in investors‘ behavior and equity trading performance. Equity trading data are combined with data from an [...]
The 5 March 2008 SEC cease and desist order (pdf here) against Fidelity Management & Research provides the retail investor an interesting insight into how some elements of the fund management and brokerage business actually work.
During the period from at least January 2002 through October 2004, two Fidelity senior executives (DeSano and Grenier) and ten [...]
Ugly circulation numbers via Kedrosky
The Audit Bureau of Circulations released circulation numbers for more than 700 daily newspapers this morning for the six-month period ending September 2007. Of the top 25 papers in daily circulation, only four showed gains… According to an analysis of ABC figures, for 538 daily U.S. newspapers, circulation declined 2.5% to [...]
Bloomberg (via Kedrosky) reports:
The first Baby Boomer applied today for Social Security benefits, a milestone marking the approaching retirement of a generation of Americans whose eligibility for government payouts threatens to overwhelm the federal budget. Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, a retired Maryland teacher who was born at 12:00:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, 1946, applied this afternoon for [...]
via Kedrosky, this 2003 paper by Hong, et al.:
A mutual fund manager is more likely to buy (or sell) a particular stock in any quarter if other managers in the same city are buying (or selling) that same stock. This pattern shows up even when the fund manager and the stock in question are [...]