• Foreign Journalists Look at America
    Posted by on April 27th, 2009 at 9:51 am

    Megan McArdle highlights this comically tone deaf article on America.

    The crisis is also making itself felt in posh Georgetown, a historic residential neighborhood in Washington D.C. which is home to many politicians, lobbyists and attorneys. Anyone who forgets to lock his car at night can expect to see unwanted guests sleeping in it by the next morning.

    I guess I missed that part. Time to load up on shares of Soylent Green (PEBL).

  • For Serious Math Geeks
    Posted by on April 25th, 2009 at 11:03 pm

    Greg Mankiw writes that stock prices “are approximately brownian motion.”
    Ironman at Poltical Calculations writes: “Since at least January 2008, stock prices moved away from approximating Brownian motion to instead follow more of a Lévy Flight.”
    Feel the chart love.

  • The Real Swines
    Posted by on April 25th, 2009 at 8:16 pm

    WHO Warns of Possible Pandemic as Mexico Seeks to Contain Swine Flu
    We begin counting: Three, two..

    Venture capital firm set to reap rewards on swine flu

  • Weekend Poll
    Posted by on April 25th, 2009 at 7:43 pm

  • JPM Is #1
    Posted by on April 24th, 2009 at 12:06 pm

    Duff McDonald writes in Portfolio:

    Goldman used to be special. Now, Goldman is merely a far smaller bank than J.P. Morgan. Sure, their results beat analyst expectations by nearly double in April. But their revenues only rose 13 percent. J.P. Morgan’s top line gain? A cool 48 percent. More to the point, J.P. Morgan’s investment bank brought in $1.4 billion in revenue in the quarter, tops on Wall Street.
    Goldman had, for a time, the most badass leader on Wall Street in Hank Paulson. But Paulson is long gone.
    Beyond generally seeming mealy-mouthed, the company’s current CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, has of late been styling himself a little like Jamie Dimon, in particular in his late-to-the-game calls for compensation reform among the country’s most overpaid paper-pushers.
    But Dimon actually exudes real confidence instead of merely putting it on as a public-relations costume. Goldman’s co-president, Jon Winkelreid, recently resigned in the wake of a bailout by his company because he was somehow—and this is really just extraordinary—insolvent. This despite being paid more than $100 million over the past decade.

    As I asked recently, why isn’t JPM now too big to fail? All those same arguments apply.

  • Hamptons Home Prices Plummet
    Posted by on April 23rd, 2009 at 5:20 pm

  • Microsoft Revenues Fall
    Posted by on April 23rd, 2009 at 5:13 pm

    For the first time since it went public 23 years ago:

    Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, on Thursday reported net income of $3.0 billion, or 33 cents a share, for its third quarter, ended March 31 — a 32 percent drop in profits from the $4.4 billion, or 47 cents a share, reported in the same period last year.
    The company’s revenue fell 6 percent to $13.7 billion from $14.5 billion.

  • Ugly Earnings from Danaher and SEI Investments
    Posted by on April 23rd, 2009 at 5:08 pm

    Danaher (DHR) isn’t doing as well I hoped. The economy is really putting the squeeze on them. Q1 earnings came in at 72 cents a share which was a penny shy of forecasts. In January, the company said to expect 70 to 80 cents a share.
    What’s most troubling is that they lowered both ends of their full-year forecast by 40 cents a share. Danaher now sees FY 2009 EPS ranging from $3.30 to $3.70 a share. At the current, the stock isn’t outrageously overpriced, but I don’t see a lot of upside. Ultimately, I like Danaher due to their management, it’s not a value play. For now, I’m sticking with them.
    SEI Investments (SEIC) also had a rough quarter. The company earned 18 cents a share, but there was a five cent charge. Adding that back in, SEIC beat the 22-cent consensus by a penny a share, but revenues dropped 26%. It looks like business is hurting across the board.
    The good news is that like a lot of financials, SEIC has had a freaky rally since its March low. The bad news is that business has been turning downward for the past year.

  • RIP: Geocities
    Posted by on April 23rd, 2009 at 3:10 pm

    Yahoo pulls the plug:

    Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Yahoo! is unceremoniously closing GeoCities, one of the original web-hosting services acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $2.87 billion. In a message on Yahoo!’s help site, the company said that it would be shuttering Geocities, a free web-hosting service, later this year and will not be accepting any new customers. Existing customers will still be able to access use GeoCities but Yahoo! is encouraging these customers to upgrade to Yahoo!’s paid Web Hosting service.
    GeoCities’ traffic has been falling over the past year. According to ComScore, GeoCities unique visitors in the U.S. fell 24 percent in March to 11.5 million unique visitors from 15.1 million in March of 2008. Back in October, 2006, it had 18.9 million uniques.
    There are plenty of other Website creation and hosting services out there, including blog platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, and Typepad, as well as Website creation and hosting services such as Ning, Webs, Jimdo, Snapages, Weebly, and countless more. GeoCities never really kept up with the times, but always remained a decent pageview generator.
    One of the pioneers of web-hosting sites, GeoCities gave users personal publishing tools and created “neighborhoods” within its web platform for users to be able to create pages, add a picture, text, a guest book and a website counter. Long before MySpace, Geocities was known as a place where teenagers, college students, and eventually others could impose their own garish taste upon the rest of the world. Here is one Geocities homepage we found from 1996: In honor of GeoCities and all that it has given the Web, whoever can come up with the worst GeoCities homepage design of all time will get a TechCrunch T-shirt.

    Personally, I think we should have given them several billion dollars in bailout money.

  • Is Oil to Blame?
    Posted by on April 23rd, 2009 at 10:27 am

    James Hamilton has a great post on the consequences of the oil shock (it’s three weeks old, unfortunately I just noticed recently). He concludes that the rise in oil prices led to the recession.

    The implication that almost all of the downturn of 2008 could be attributed to the oil shock is a stronger conclusion than emerged from any of the other models surveyed in my Brookings paper, and is a conclusion that I don’t fully believe myself. Unquestionably there were other very important shocks hitting the economy in 2007-08, first among which would be the problems in the housing sector. But housing had already been subtracting 0.94% from the average annual GDP growth rate over 2006:Q4-2007:Q3, when the economy did not appear to be in a recession. And housing subtracted only 0.89% over 2007:Q4-2008:Q3, when we now say that the economy was in recession. Something in addition to housing began to drag the economy down over the later period, and all the calculations in the paper support the conclusion that oil prices were an important factor in turning that slowdown into a recession.

    Of course the problems in the economy were building for a long time, and without an oil shock, they simply would have been put off and not fixed.