I will be incimmunicado today, winging my way back from Berlin for 8 und a heff hours. I wrote this in 2005, but never published it widely. Enjoy: > What sort of crap do you have lurking hidden on your iPod? That’s the question on an older article I stumbled across from my old e&e blog. The Arizona ...

bianco-res > Jim has run Bianco Research out of Chicago since November 1990. He has been producing fixed income commentaries with a circulation of hundreds of portfolio managers and traders. Jim’s commentaries have a special emphasis on: money flow characteristics of primary dealers, mutual funds, ...

Evan Newmark writes a regular column on the WSJ’s Deal Journal. His stock in trade is contrarian takes on the markets and politics. To the extent that he represents an extreme version of the Wall Street world view, he’s a bellwether. Yesterday, he may have run the bell a bit too hard. In a post explaining ...

Squanderville versus Thriftville (Warren Buffet) in Fortune

Back in October, I laughed off the latest China GDP data as utterly fabricated. As it turns out, I was not the only one. China expert Gordon G. Chang (author of The Coming Collapse of China) is more than skeptical — he has the data to question much of China’s growth miracle. Spoiler alert: Its been ...

While the US$ caught a bid this week, albeit modest, in part due to Bernanke’s acknowledgement of it on Monday in terms of its impact on commodity prices and thus inflation, the fed funds futures continue to reduce its belief that he’ll follow words with actions. Since Friday’s close, full odds of a ...

1. Most Blues begin, “Woke up this morning.” 2. “I got a good woman” is a bad way to begin the Blues, ‘less you stick something nasty in the next line, like “I got a good woman, with the meanest face in town.” 3. The Blues is simple. After you get the first line right, repeat it. Then find something ...

Compared to historical norms, Nasdaq market capitalization is significantly above median levels relative to GDP. The Nasdaq’s median percentage of GDP has averaged 61.8%; its now over 100%. As the chart below shows, the big aberrational periods have been due Fed bubble inflation: first in 1998-2000; ...

The Nov Philly Fed manufacturing survey was 16.7, 4.5 pts above expectations and up from 11.5 in Oct. It’s the highest since June ‘07 but the figure measures the direction of change, not the degree. New Orders jumped sharply to 14.8 from 6.2 but Backlogs fell 4 pts to -5.4. Employment improved by more ...

As long as I am here in Europe, I might as well give you some flavor of what has become known as Recession Porn: The most dire forecasts expecting the most egregious outcomes. Today’s “Crisis Porn” comes to us via Société Générale by way of the UK’s Telegraph, and its Pretty grim: “In a report entitled ...