May 18, 2013, 5:15 pm
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Krugman vs. Sandwichman: "The economics of full employment is not rocket science. It's the politics, stupid."
At his blog today, Paul Krugman cited Michael Kalecki's 1943 essay, "Political Aspects of Full Employment": Two and a half years ago Mike Konczal reminded us of a classic 1943 (!) essay by Michal Kalecki, who suggested...
S&P Cuts Berkshire Rating on Revised Methodology
Standard & Poor's on Thursday cut the credit rating of Berkshire Hathaway one notch after changing its methodology for evaluating insurers but still affirmed the company's overall financial...
BP Ex-CEO Is Interim Chair at Mining Giant
Mining and commodities trading giant Glencore Xstrata said it has appointed former BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward as its interim chairman until a permanent candidate can be...
Royal Bank of Scotland to cut 1,400 jobs in UK
DUBLIN (Reuters) - Royal Bank of Scotland will cut 1,400 jobs over the next two years in a restructuring of its retail head office in Britain, the part-nationalized bank said on Thursday. ...
US Consumers Eating Out More
From CNBC:Sales at eating and drinking places in April reached $45.9 billion, a $200 million seasonally-adjusted increase from the previous high in December 2012, according to preliminary figures from the U.S. Census ...
Avoid Over-Reacting to Trending News by Knowing Your Stocks
I have a saying that when there is no news, the market reveals its true direction. That applies to individual securities as well as the market as a whole. Why? Think of institutional traders, who drive much of the market. They are so big...
10 Thursday AM Reads
My morning reads: • Remember This Moment When the Black Swans All Had Their necks Broken (The Reformed Broker) • Soros Joins Gold-Stake Cuts Before Bear Market Drop (Bloomberg) • Indulge Your Appetite for Stocks (for now)...
Rice in Line to be National Security Adviser
"Insiders with ties to the Obama administration tell The Cable that U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice has become the heir apparent to National Security Advisor Tom Donilon -- a post at the epicenter of foreign-policy decision making...
Groupon Co-CEO Ted Leonsis: We Can Be a $100 Billion Company
Filed under: Company News, CEOs, Deals, Coupons, Shopping TrendsMatthew Staver/Bloomberg via Getty Images By HENRY BLODGET The co-CEOs of Groupon, Eric Lefkofsky and Ted Leonsis (pictured above), stopped by our offices this afternoon, along with CFO...
Paul Krugman's Misguided Moral Crusade Against Austerity
Feeling perhaps that columnist Paul Krugman hasn't made the point emphatically enough, The New York Times Monday published an op-ed shocker by two academics with the title, "How Austerity...
Groupon Inc (GRPN) Unlikely To Appoint New CEO Until Next Year
Eric Lefkofsky and Ted Leonisis, the interim chief executive officers of Groupon Inc (NASDAQ:GRPN) indicated that the company is unlikely to appoint a permanent CEO until next year. According to the interim CEOs, the daily-deals company is in the...
Is Google Ready to Crush PayPal?
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) really wants to get things going with new payment methods, and it seems to be leveraging just about every platform available to it, from the web to mobile devices and everything between. The company put a lot of focus on functioning...
Soros Cut Gold ETF Holdings Before Crash
George Soros, founder and chairman of Soros Fund Management reduced his holdings of exchange-traded products backed by gold before a price plunge last...
Apple: Susquehanna Starts at Hold; Larger-Screen iPhone Key
Shares of Apple (AAPL) closed down $15.01, or 3.4%, at $428.85, pressured by news of some funds dumping the stock, as the Barron’s Focus on Funds blog reported. The stock this afternoon got an initiation of coverage from Suquehanna Financial...
Tesla Motors’ Bid for Cash May Also Fuel Critics
Tesla Motors on Wednesday announced plans to tap the markets for more cash, a move that will buy it precious time to meet its ambitious goals but will also fuel debate over its...
Morning News: May 16, 2013
Japan Posts Surge in Economic Growth UK Uncut Loses Legal Challenge Over Goldman Sachs Tax Deal With HMRC After Bangladesh, Seeking New Sources E.U. Considers Emissions Fines for Chinese and Indian Airlines Homebuilder Confidence in U.S. Climbs as...
It's About To Get Very Busy In The US
US stock markets closed at all-time highs yesterday and futures are currently pointing to a positive open. We're about to get a ton of data that could quickly change the momentum of this market. Here's a preview of upcoming events courtesy of...
Apple: Piper Sees iPhone Holding Resale Value Better than Samsung Models
Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster today reiterated his Overweight rating on shares of Apple (AAPL) and a price target of $655, offering up the first of a monthly report on the resale value of the iPhone in comparison to devices based on Google‘s...
Google opens its Cloud Platform Compute Engine to all comers, updates App Engine
During Google's I/O developer's conference keynote, it actually slipped in quite a bit of, yes, developer news amongst all the noisy consumer launches. One biggie was the announcement that any and all companies looking for computing...
Top Hedge Fund Manager Predicts A Collapse In The Art Market
Michael Novogratz, the head of Fortress Investment Group, appeared on CNBC yesterday. Among other things, he talked about what he considered to be an ongoing bubble in art. "Art is 100 percent a bubble—I mean it has all the markings for a...
TrackingPoint Innovations: A Smart Gun that rarely misses, even at long range
Control advocates are obviously having a very hard time keeping up with the technological changes. The device is currently very expensive:A team of 70 people spent three years creating the technology. Schauble says there's nothing else...
Abercrombie & Fitch Joins Bangladesh Pact
Abercrombie & Fitch, in a break with most of its U.S. retail counterparts, on Wednesday said it had agreed to sign on to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in...
Even some Democrats are getting tired of Obama never accepting responsibility for anything bad that happens in his administration
Even Dana Milbank at the Washington Post has this:President Passerby needs urgently to become a participant in his presidency. Late Monday came the breathtaking news of a full-frontal assault on the First Amendment by his administration: word...
Bianca Bosker: The Truth Behind Google's Bizarre Mission To Make Tech 'Go Away'
As a cadre of Google executives took turns touting Google's newest products at a conference in California on Wednesday, they also described how they were working toward a future in which technology would disappear. That might sound like a bizarre...
'About That Debt Crisis? Never Mind'
Paul Krugman on the recent news that the deficit is falling: About That Debt Crisis? Never Mind, by Paul Krugman: OK, another toe dipped in reality. The new CBO numbers are out, and they scream “debt crisis? What debt...
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Nokia pits the Lumia 928 against the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S III in low-light video shootout
Now that the Lumia 928's mere existence is official, Nokia's posted a video comparing its footage-shooting chops against the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S III in low-light conditions. Naturally, the folks in Espoo are showcasing just what PureView...
The Warnings Behind the Numbers
The latest G.D.P. announcement belies more troubling news for America’s...
Will Samsung’s Future TV Bend and Twist Before Apple’s?
A newly published patent by Samsung Electronics may just end up being the solution to every lazy TV watcher’s problems. Mashable reports the filing describing a TV with a flexible display and thankfully, TV-watchers won’t...
The High Cost of Killing the Next ‘Superbug’
An antibiotic-resistant strain of gonorrhea that's now considered a superbug has some analysts saying that the bacteria's effects could match those of AIDS. "This might be a lot worse than AIDS in the short run because the...
Financial Media Celebrates Apple’s Tax Evasion Bond Deal
As is par for the course, the financial media is telling a story about a major US company from the perspective of the investing classes, rather than the broader public. The poster child is the New York Times’ Dealbook, in a story titled...
Goodbye, Alan
Legendary Barron's columnist Alan Abelson has passed away today at the age of 87. I was at a conference with Michael Santoli a week ago and Alan had come up in conversation - Abelson hadn't been filing his weekly Up & Down Wall Street...
GOP Bill Would Eliminate America's Economic Data
WASHINGTON -- A group of Republicans are cooking up legislation that could give President Barack Obama an unintentional assist with disagreeable unemployment numbers -- by eliminating the key economic statistic altogether. The bill, introduced last week...
Speculation Of A Nexus Q Replacement Swirls After An Unannounced Google Media Streamer Hits The FCC
Google is prepping… something. An announced Google media streamer was recently found in the FCC’s testing database. Details are nearly nonexistent as most are held under a confidentiality agreement for the next 45 days. However, the...
When Defensive Stocks Plays Offense
Stop it already with the "low volatility" thing. Your so-called low-vol trade is actually high-vol now that everyone's sick of bonds but afraid to bet on growth. The rally is not about low-vol, it's about value stocks and dividends...
Abercrombie & Fitch Joins Bangladesh Pact
Abercrombie & Fitch, in a break with most of its U.S. retail counterparts, on Wednesday said it had agreed to sign on to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in...
FOMC Statement: "fiscal policy is restraining economic growth", "prepared to increase or reduce the pace of its...
The key changes: 1) "fiscal policy is restraining economic growth." 2) "The Committee is prepared to increase or reduce the pace of its purchases to maintain appropriate policy accommodation as the outlook for the labor market or...
Bond Funds And Central Banks Are Buying Equities
Morningstar recently reported the number of bond funds buying or holding stocks is at the highest level in 18 years. The below chart from Charles Schwab details data over the last ten years. Schwab/Morningstar note the percentage of bond funds holding...
Apple: iPhone Market Share Retracing, Cheaper Model May Help, Says Bernstein
Google Set to Introduce Music Service to Compete With Spotify
The service is expected to be announced on Wednesday, and reflects agreements the company has made with the three major music...
You Should Be Worried If The ECB Just Cuts Rates Tomorrow
The ECB has its monthly meeting tomorrow, and there's a pretty big consensus growing that it's going to do some kind of rate cut. Inflation has fallen to 1.2%, and unemployment is up to 12.1%. This situation demands a policy response. Even the...
New CEO Of World's Biggest Mining Giant Plans To Slow Down Investment Spending 'Quite Significantly'
More evidence that the mining/commodity boom has crested. The new CEO of global mining giant BHP Billiton, Andrew Mackenzie, tells WSJ that he plans to cut investment spending "quite significantly" and be more diligent about returning cash to...
'Everyone Has the Same Chance at the AER, Right?'
Publication in our best journals is based on factors other than merit, "author prestige also comes into play": Everyone has the same chance at the AER, right?, by John Whitehead: Wrong: We spoke with Virginia economics professor...
NPLs and lights in dark places
Consider this chart from JP Morgan’s Flows & Liquidity team. It shows the evolution of non-performing loan ratios (as percentages of total loans) across three different Euro area blocks: Germany, core and periphery. The definition of a...
Bernanke, Economic Prospects for the Long Run
Speech at the Bard College at Simon's Rock, Great Barrington,...
Tarullo’s speech on capital and regulation
Fed governor Dan Tarullo’s speech on bank capital and regulation could well invigorate the same amount of public discussion as Jeremy Stein’s speech on the role of monetary policy and asset bubbles did. Tarullo’s comments...