A few important conceptual milestones on the macro front over the past weeks.
First, it’s pretty clear the real economy is now collapsing both due to tight credit as all financial actors deleverage and as a result of a revision in growth expectations such as Keynes wrote so clearly about. Forced liquidity was not enough. An [...]
I’m off to the APEC CEO Summit in Lima, Peru and so in a bit of a rush. So I’ll just dump the good stuff that’s crossing my desk this Monday morning without too much editorial.
In short, I’m looking for signs of de-coupling of the real economy from the financial smoke and mirror factories - [...]
Could this economic data be the reason for the urgency in bailing out the Wall Street banks?
Initial filings for state jobless benefits increased by a seasonally adjusted 32,000 to 493,000 in the third week of September… the highest number of weekly claims since Sept. 29, 2001, when unemployment soared in the wake of [...]
A team of biologists and chemists is closing in on bringing non-living matter to life.
A lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life… Szostak’s protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that [...]
So, in the space of a single week and weekend we have (links via naked capitalism):
the Fed nationalising the largest mortgage institutions in all but name,
Lehman going bankrupt after Barclays joins the list of ex-deals,
Merrills “anchoring” Countrywide at Bank of America,
AIG, the worlds’ largest insurer “pulling together a survival plan “, and
the Fed “taking a [...]
If you wake up tomorrow, then the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland didn’t create a black hole that swallowed the earth. Its collisions will generate seven times the energy of its most powerful rival, the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.
Not to worry,
… the actual experiments that could [...]
Turns out those cash registers aren’t any more secure than voting machines, and the incentives to get it right are just as bad.
“Zappers” alter the electronic sales records in a cash register. To satisfy tax collectors, the tally of food orders, for example, must match the register’s final cash total… The more sophisticated [...]
The results are in on the 24/7 relay to attract US consumer eyeballs to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games; with a surprising upset for online going to Yahoo rather than NBC.
The ratings for NBC’s television coverage of the Games were record-breaking this month. But the extent to which the Internet served as a supplement to [...]
The NYT recaps the newfound enthusiasm for touch screens sparked by Apple. They note that Elo TouchSystems (Tyco), Perceptive Pixel, and N-trig are all hoping to cash in.
But Joseph W. Deal, the president and C.E.O. of Wacom Technology, which makes touch screens and electronic input tools and recently announced its own multitouch technology, issues a [...]
Two high school students gathered fish samples being sold around Manhattan and had them genetically “barcoded” at University of Guelph in Ontario:
…like dropping film off at the supermarket for developing… 2 of the 4 restaurants and 6 of the 10 grocery stores had sold mislabeled fish… one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were [...]