Archive for May, 2009

  • Figures on government spending and debt
    , May 26th, 2009 at 4:44 pm

    From AP:

    Total public debt subject to limit May 22…….11,241,715
    Statutory debt limit…………………………………12,104,000
    Total public debt outstanding May 22………..11,301,676
    Operating balance May 22……………………………229,391
    Interest fiscal year 2009 thru April………………..193,439
    Interest same period 2008…………………………..243,904
    Deficit fiscal year 2009 thru April……………………802,294
    Deficit same period 2008……………………………..153,471
    Receipts fiscal year 2009 thru April……………..1,256,066
    Receipts same period 2008 ……………………….1,549,720
    Outlays fiscal year 2009 thru April……………….2,058,360
    Outlays same period 2008…………………………1,703,191
    Gold assets in April………………………………………..11,041

    I’m assuming these are in millions of dollars.

  • Apparently, Everyone Saw It Coming
    , May 26th, 2009 at 2:48 pm

    Google results for “predicted the recession.”

  • The Savings Glut Is Legit
    , May 26th, 2009 at 2:16 pm

    Megan McArdle has a very good defense of the savings glut argument. Just because Alan Greenspan believes something doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
    I think the giant amount of Chinese investment that came into U.S. Treasuries massively altered our financial system. Too many folks see this story as an excuse to get Greenspan off the hook. That’s not necessarily the case.
    We tend to think of lending someone money is doing them a favor. If you really want to hurt a country, don’t invade them, lend them too much money.

  • 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Ben Bernanke
    , May 26th, 2009 at 12:11 pm

    From US News & World Report:

    1. Ben Shalom Bernanke was born Dec. 13, 1953, in Augusta, Ga. The family moved to Dillon, S.C., when he was 4 months old.
    2. Bernanke’s father, Philip, was a partner in a pharmacy; his mother, Edna, was a substitute teacher.
    3. Bernanke learned to read in kindergarten and skipped first grade. At age 11, he won the South Carolina state spelling bee.
    4. In high school, he taught himself calculus, since his school did not offer the course. He scored a 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and graduated at the top of his class in 1971.
    5. He received his B.A. in economics from Harvard in 1975 and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979.
    6. During college breaks, Bernanke worked a variety of jobs, including a summer as a waiter at South of the Border, a Mexican-themed roadside attraction near the border of North and South Carolina.
    7. In 1979, Bernanke moved to California, where he taught economics at Stanford while his new wife, Anna, pursued her master’s.
    8. In 1985, Bernanke moved back east to teach at Princeton; in 1996, he became chairman of the university’s economics department.
    9. In 2002, he became a Federal Reserve governor. Three years later, he was named chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. In February 2006, he became the 14th chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
    10. Bernanke learned Hebrew partly from his grandfather. He officiated at the bar and bat mitzvahs of his children, Joel and Alyssa, without the help of a rabbi.

    (HT: WSF)

  • Reuters on Zari Rachev
    , May 26th, 2009 at 10:31 am

    Here’s an interesting article on Zari Rachev.

    Professor Zari Rachev scorns the idea that market cataclysms cannot be forecast. He says his statistical models have predicted them, and his customers agree.
    His daughter is now president of New York-based company FinAnalytica, which uses his models to provide investors and risk managers with a risk indicator that takes into account the worst-case scenarios.
    As those who have so far survived the financial crisis pick over the wreckage to develop enhanced predictors of market risk, Rachev’s are among the offerings for people who believe statistical models can help.
    “This past year was very important for us, because it validated everything that we worked for,” Boryana Racheva-Iotova told Reuters by telephone from Bulgaria.
    Her firm’s risk measure, fat-tailed expected tail loss or ETL, gave investors advance notice of a sharp fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average among other markets: the Dow fell from a life high in November 2007 to a 12-year low in March 2009, sliding sharpest after Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008.

    You can read the rest here.

  • Zimbabwe’s Mugabe Stands by Central Bank Chief
    , May 26th, 2009 at 10:23 am

    The AP reports:

    President Robert Mugabe has vowed to keep the central bank governor in his post despite demands by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai that he be removed.
    State radio on Tuesday quotes Mugabe as saying central bank chief Gideon Gono “saved the country” with the measures he took.
    Others have criticized Gono for printing Zimbabwe dollars until they were worthless and raiding hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign currency accounts belonging to aid groups and private businesses.
    Mugabe made his comments during a funeral Monday for Gono’s brother Peter.
    Mugabe reappointed Gono to a second five-year term in November. Former opposition leader Tsvangirai says that appointment violates his power-sharing deal with Mugabe.

    I like how the highlighted paragraph is an attempt to show balance.

  • It’s All About the Axes
    , May 26th, 2009 at 10:01 am

    Here’s a slightly more accurate view of Amazon.com (AMZN):
    image810.png

  • Best Headline of the Day
    , May 26th, 2009 at 9:10 am

    From CNBC:

    Depression Likely, but Buy Stocks: Strategist

  • Lower Libor May Not Be a Good Sign
    , May 26th, 2009 at 8:59 am

    Bloomberg has an interesting article saying that the lower Libor may actually reflect growing worries in the credit markets instead of a thawing.

    “The disparity and the difference is really a signal to the market of who really wants to make some loans and who’s got the ability to make those loans,” said Mark MacQueen, partner and money manager at Austin, Texas-based Sage Advisory Services Ltd., which oversees $7.5 billion. “A lot of banks are just trying to hold on to what they have and not really make loans.”
    Rather than signaling that the world’s banks are more willing to lend to each other, some investors and strategists say the decline in Libor has more to do with deposits reducing demand for funds in the interbank market. Deposits at U.S. banks jumped by almost $400 billion in the past six months, according to Jim Vogel, head of bond research at Memphis, Tennessee-based FTN Financial.
    “Libor’s decline is not necessarily a sign of improving bank credit or the willingness of banks to lend to each other,” said Vogel, whose firm is one of the 10 biggest underwriters of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other U.S. government agency debt. “It’s a sign of improving bank liquidity as customer deposit growth replaces borrowing in the short-term money markets.”

  • The Challenge for Economics
    , May 25th, 2009 at 9:49 am

    In the NYT, Greg Mankiw writes on how the credit crisis will affect economics. His answer: Not much. The basics of economics are still in place although some topics will deserve more attention. Here’s a sample:

    THE LIMITS OF MONETARY POLICY
    The textbook answer to recessions is simple: When the economy suffers from high unemployment and reduced capacity utilization, the central bank can cut interest rates and stimulate the demand for goods and services. When businesses see higher demand, they hire more workers to meet it.
    Only rarely in the past did students ask what would happen if the central bank cut interest rates all the way to zero and it still wasn’t enough to get the economy going again. That is no surprise; after all, interest rates near zero weren’t something that they, or even their parents, had ever experienced. But now, with the Federal Reserve’s target interest rate at zero to 0.25 percent, that question is much more pressing.
    The Fed is acting with the conviction that it has other tools to put the economy back on track. These include buying a much broader range of financial assets than it typically includes in its portfolio. Students will need to know about these other tools of monetary policy — and will also need to know that economists are far from certain how well these tools work.