Evening Reading – November 29, 2010
The New York Times DealBook: Why I Chose Not to Wear a Wire
Many people seem truly astonished by my decision not to comply with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s request to wear a wiretap to record conversations with a client. I have even been asked, “Why not just agree to wear the wire to show that no wrongdoing had occurred?”
The Slope Of Hope: POMO Erotic Tendencies
The Big Picture: Resilient Markets
Say what you will about QE2, holiday sales, economic fundamentals: This market is resilient.
Look, anyone with even half a brain knows that the massive bailouts only papered over the structural problems. We all know that no country can borrow/stimulate/ease its way to prosperity. That said, you would have to be a fool to ignore the impact of a tidal wave of Treasury and Fed monies since early 2009.
The Big Picture: Time is on my side, yes it is!?
Ireland’s government, banks and bondholders were officially bought about 7 1/2 years of time at a price of about 6%. The other bailout child, Greece, didn’t want to be left out and they are being given an extra 4 1/2 years to their three timetable to payback its loans in order to match the Irish maturities.
The Big Picture: Online inflation reading from BPP
Adding another source for gauging inflation trends, the Billion Prices Project from MIT “collects prices from hundreds of online retailers around the world on a daily basis to conduct economic research.” Their indices include “daily prices on the full population of products sold by individual retailers.”
The Big Picture: World Map, Rearranged by Population
Big Think asks, “What if the world were rearranged so that the inhabitants of the country with the largest population would move to the country with the largest area? And the second-largest population would migrate to the second-largest country, and so on?”
FT Alphaville: Worst banking conspiracy ever
Have you ever heard of Inter-Alpha? We hadn’t until this weekend, although we tend not to frequent the conspiracy sites that lump it in alongside the world’s Bilderbergs, Rothschilds, and the Stonecutters.
FT Alphaville: The Merkel crash
So what’s really behind the spike in Spanish government bond yields on Monday?