From Bob Wenzel at EconomicPolicyJournal.com:
Explosive new information has broken with regard to destruction of pre-9-11 options trading records.
Just prior to 9-11, someone (or group of people) bought large amounts of put options on various airline stocks. Put options gain in value when a stock goes down. The airline stocks went down after 9-11. Continue reading
Rob Viglione at Seeking Alpha:
We can explain the rapid declines in homeowner wealth with the real estate bubble bursting in 2007, but how can we explain the general shifting in real estate capital structures going from 84% equity in 1945 to a mere 38% in 2010? Continue reading
In a piece called “Tea-Party Jacobins,” NY Times, May 27, 2010, (hat-tip to LRC blog), Mark Lilla calls Tea Party activists a “libertarian mob,” since they proclaim the belief “that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone” and they have only one “Garbo-like thing to say, they want to be left alone.”
Hmmmm. Couldn’t have said it better m’self. Consider me now a card-carrying member of the libertarian mob. Continue reading
Mark Mitchell at Deep Capture on well-known hedge-fund “activist,” David Einhorn:
“In addition, Allied was not, as Einhorn claimed, a massive Ponzi scheme. Einhorn had made the smarmy suggestion that Allied was a Ponzi because it supposedly raised money from the markets to pay its dividends. An SEC official told the inspector general that this claim was patently false – it was perfectly obvious that Allied legitimately paid dividends out of earnings. Continue reading
Forbes on where richer than average households are moving within the USA, June 14, 2010:
No. 1: Collier County, Fla.
Arriving average income per capita: $76,161
Departing average income per capita: $26,128
Stationary household average income per capita: $49,959
Total arriving people: 15,150
Total departing people: 16,802
Top origin: Lee County, Fla. (2,987 people) Continue reading
In the upcoming edition of The Atlantic Nicholas Carr suggests that even Google’s biggest fans are finding the far too solicitous company’s latest technology, Google Suggest, more creepy than cuddly: Continue reading
Cinematical.com (via Greg at Our Holy Cause) has a synopsis of the underrated 1964 movie, “The Americanization of Emily,” with its ironic antiwar message: Continue reading
Humble Libertarian enjoys some unseemly lulz at the expense of revolutionary never-wasser Che Guevara:
“What a shame. All that time fighting capitalism only to end up making capitalists rich selling t-shirts of his face to ignorant, white, middle class, wannabes who wear his image with their name brand sneakers, designer jeans, and Axe body spray while sipping Starbuck’s Coffee. Karma is definitely real.”
Organizations and Markets has a brief bibliography of the evolution of accounting by the distinguished libertarian economic historian, Sudha Shenoy. Accounting emerged without state intervention as a type of Hayekian spontaneous order:
“Someone asked whether accounting conventions can be interpreted as a kind of “spontaneous order,” in Hayek’s sense, or if the standard rules are the result mainly of state intervention. Sudha replied with these reading suggestions (lightly edited by me): Continue reading
In the old days, people who did things for love of their community, for idealism, or for a cause they believed in, were in it just for that. They deserved the respect they got. Today, volunteer work has been festooned with all kinds of goodies, and, not unnaturally, it’s drawing people more interested in the goodies than the good. And not unexpectedly, the king of “doing well by doing good” – Goldman Sachs – is in the thick of it. Continue reading