See Stacy Herbert’s summary as well.
Edward Harrison On the Edge With Max Keiser Again
by ilene - June 4th, 2010 10:08 am
Edward Harrison On the Edge With Max Keiser Again
Courtesy of Edward Harrison at Credit Writedowns
Max and Stacy talk about Twitter hashtag manipulation, elections in Reykjavik and the BP oil spill for some good fun. Later in the episode I come on and ruin it with a little doom and gloom. Take a look.
OK, the BP stuff isn’t fun; it’s scary. I love the spin Max puts on Goldman bonuses and American military incursions. I don’t buy it, but it’s good rhetoric. By the way, I like the Max Keiser doll that Max has on his desk. Where’s the Stacy Herbert doll – and where’s my action figure doll?
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Death-Spiral Intercept
by Chart School - April 15th, 2010 3:53 pm
Death-Spiral Intercept
Courtesy of Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker
In essence, White was saying: "it’s the debt, stupid." When aggregate debt levels build up across business cycles, economists focused on managingwithin business cycles miss the key ingredient that leads to systemic crisis. It should be expected that politicians or private sector participants worried about the day-to-day exhibit short-termism. But White says it is particularly troubling that economists and their models exhibit the same tendency because it means there is no long-term oriented systemic counterweight guiding the economy.
This short-termism that White refers to is what I call the asset-based economic model. And, quite frankly, it works – especially when interest rates are declining as they have over the past quarter century. The problem, however, is that you reach a critical state when the accumulation of debt and the misallocation of resources is so large that the same old policies just don’t work anymore. And that’s when the next crisis occurs.
It seems that Mr. [Edward] Harrison has it figured out. He goes on to spend a lot of digital ink on the periphery of the bottom line, which is that we continue to think of debt in terms of service costs (indeed, you’ll hear Bernanke talk about it, but never about the actual gross financial system debt outstanding.)
When you boil all this down, however, you get to the following chart (trendline added by moi):
You can see what’s going on here – each "crisis" leads to lower lows and lower highs.
This presents two problems:
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Lower lows have run into the zero boundary. That wasn’t sufficient this time, which of course is why we got "Quantitative Easing" and other similar abortions intended to distort market rates – like guarantees on bank debt, for example. Ultimately this devolves into The Fed or The Government (as if there’s a real difference) guaranteeing everything to prevent spreads from blowing out.
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Far more sinister, however, is what happens to the top line. The top line – that is, the maximum rate between crises, declines because it becomes impossible to normalize rates - nobody can afford to pay "normal" rates with the amount of leverage they have.
This is where the ultimate failure in policy arrives, and it…
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Edward Harrison On the Edge with Max Keiser
by ilene - December 18th, 2009 6:58 pm
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Selling the good news does not a bull market make
by ilene - September 1st, 2009 9:07 pm
Selling the good news does not a bull market make
Courtesy of Edward Harrison at Credit Writedowns
So we started September in an ugly way. With the markets down 2% across the board, and oil and bond yields also falling. Forgive me for thinking this is a bad sign, but selling on good news doesn’t sound very bullish.
And the ISM data definitely was bullish. Production 61.9 – Yay! New orders 64.9 – Hurrah! What’s not to like? But the Dow was down 185 points – Boo! What gives?
Well, for one, bank shares were decimated (see the sea of red in the chart [below]?). But, there’s more to it than that; Wal-mart was the only stock to rise in the Dow. For the S&P, we had breadth of 16-1 for decliners to advancers. This was a broad-based selloff – and one that took place with the backdrop of positive economic data from manufacturing and housing.
To me, that is a very worrying sign. Now, obviously I expect a market correction (see posts here and here). But, I neither expect nor want a crash (I do think this is a possibility, however, given how far stocks have run without a correction).
It is now September, the month of market jitters, and the financial services industry is headed back from their long slumber. Things get serious in September. Let’s hope they don’t get too serious or Paul Tudor Jones is looking like a financial prophet yet again.
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The bezzle is shrinking
by ilene - June 12th, 2009 7:43 pm
It’s always exciting for me to find new authors who kindly agree to contribute to our excellent collection of Favorite’s articles. So, I am happy to have discovered Edward Harrison at Credit Writedowns, and I’m happy to share a couple interesting posts that follow. – Ilene
The bezzle is shrinking
Courtesy of Edward Harrison at Credit Writedowns
"In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. there is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in – or more precisely not in – the country’s business and banks. This inventory – it should be called the bezzle. It also varies in size with the business cycle."
Well, it seems history is repeating itself because the bezzle is shrinking again as many frauds are now uncovered. Witness the latest in South Africa
:
Hundreds of investors have been fleeced of up to 10 billion rand ($1.5 billion) in what could be South Africa’s biggest corporate fraud, a private investigator
…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.