International Investing

Me either. 
In December, the Fed had $775B worth of Treasury securities. That stock will soon have dwindled to $300B, give or take. The difference, about $475B, represents an investment by the central bank in risky assets of the US financial sector. $475B is an extraordinary sum of money. It is as if the Fed [...]

From the Daily Reckoning:
“On the household front, millions of homeowners haven’t even finished paying their heating bills from last winter, and over six million Americans asked for energy assistance funds so their power wouldn’t be shut off. (In California alone, 1.7 million households are behind on their utility payments.)
“Signs of the stretched [...]

From the WSJ, showing scary near-term projections:

In From Dawn to Decadence Jacques Barzun noted that, “A decadent culture offers opportunities chiefly to the satirist.”  Maybe so, but these days it is nearly impossible to distinguish satire from fact:
The Federal Reserve, along with other central banks, said Friday that it was increasing the funding it is providing to banks and announced [...]

This excerpt is from Charles Darwin’s The Journey of the Beagle, published in 1839. As you can see from this passage he recognized the role of property rights in the ascent of man above a substinance living:

Whether we look at it as a cause or a consequence, the more civilized always have the most artificial [...]

From today’s WSJ. I keep searching for the punchline but it appears to be real:
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair is finalizing a legislative proposal that would allow the Treasury Department to make direct loans for close to one million homeowners in the latest government initiative to stabilize the slumping mortgage market.
…
For loans to [...]

A case in point about the incompetence of state control. According to this story, during a period of record high oil prices, the Mexican national oil company is actually LOSING money:
Mexico’s Cantarell oil field — discovered in 1976 and one of the world’s largest — is drying up. Pemex reported a 2007 net loss of [...]

Caroline Baum places the blame where it belongs:
From legislation to root out discrimination in mortgage lending, to the resultant relaxation of lending standards, to the tax-advantaged status of housing, “the aggressive pursuit of homeownership as a benchmark for success is at the root of the problems we’re seeing today,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist at [...]

This clearly written FT article discusses why banks loved this tranche of CDO debt and why it is now such an issue:
Sometimes they did this simply to keep the CDO machine running. But there was another, far more important, incentive: regulatory arbitrage.
Most notably, because super-senior debt carried the AAA tag, banks were only required to [...]

Many people were surprised in 2006 when WSJ pointed out that being on the intranet does not lower capital investment costs. According to the article (Jeff Matthews’ notes are very good here)
“What does this have to do with Google? Well, Google management highlighted big capital expenditure plans at last week’s analyst meeting—which at a minimum [...]