May 09, 2008

			Reasons for Feeling Unstimulated ("The check is in the mail."We've all heard that (or said it). When a debtor says that, he normally means that the check is nowhere near being in the mail....)
			Skadden's Tax Work Helps Firm Become D.C. Behemoth (Legal Times: Skadden Posts Huge Capital Gains, by Marisa McQuilken: It's the highest-grossing firm in New York, and for that matter, in the United...)
			WSJ: Obama's Faulty Tax Argument (Op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal: Obama's Faulty Argument, by Andrew G. Biggs (American Enterprise Institute): As the presidential campaign heats up, a key...)
			Who's feeling the stress? (Have you ever had one for those days? Your charting software didn't work just right, your Internet connection was doggedly slow, and you forgot to read up on this week's...)
			Pick of the Day: GBP/USD - Trade Update (Our short position was triggered and just before the open of the European trading session this morning, our first profit target was hit as Cable picked up...)
			Tuesday links: Sprint Extel? (Is it too soon to start calling the company, Sprint Extel (S)? (WSJ.com) A hedge fund fight over Sears Holdings (SHLD). (ChicagoTribune.com, Market Movers) Google...)
			Berkshire Update
			The Fed, Finally Gets a Grip...for $30 Billion
			Oil and gold contest update #1 (Despite what you might hear on CNBC right about now regarding plunging U.S. stocks, it was a good week for hard assets - oil was up almost 9 percent and gold rose more...)
			Buybacks seem to deter takeovers.
			Obama is Here (There's a rally for Obama going on outside the building where my office is located. The Secret Service said to stay away from the windows, and to leave them shut (or they'd show up and...)
			Long Cable (Buy GBP/USD at market (9559)Stop Loss= 9429Target=...)
			Close Cable trade (Short Cable TradeExit at 9554Result: -45...)
			Letter to the NEJM (The issue of off-label prescribing is heating up again. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine by Randall Stafford made the case for greater regulation. I am...)
			Where do the kept women go? (Zubin Jelveh reports: If you're a married woman living in the New York City area, there's a better than 50 percent chance that you don't work, according to a recent...)
			Bank Failure: Some details on ANB Financial
			Bank Failure: ANB Financial Costs FDIC $214 million
			FedEx Lowers Earnings Guidance
			Forbes Reporting on the Financial Meltdown Scenario (The idea that I presented in a recent article that we face the risk of a "financial meltdown" is becoming more mainstream. Today Munchau...)
			Samwick Media Watch (I'll be on NPR's Marketplace this evening, putting in my 1% of a share of Bear Stearns stock on the goings-on in financial markets. The theme--is this fair and why should you...)
			Two Problems, One Mathematics (1 of 2) ("Besicovitch insists that I publish; the fact that I was able to forsee interesting mathematical results shows that there must be be something in the theory."...)
			J. S. Mill on Method (1.0 IntroductionJohn Stuart Mill wrote an essay on the methodology of economics or rather, in the language of his day, Political Economy. I look at it in a Whiggish fashion to...)
			Good Resource on Derivatives (I recently came across this site called Global Derivatives. They've got some resources that students (and faculty) might find useful: a number of excellent spreadsheet...)
			Studies Show That 87% of All Statistics Are Made up On the Spot (Once again, Scott Adams nails it. ...)
			Exam Blogging (I'm in the midst of giving my Advanced Corporate Finance class their final. Since it's open-book/ open-notes, monitoring costs are almost zero (I just have to check for occasional...)
			Stock Tickers Bleg (I'm working on a project with my students, and need a list of the tickers of ALL publicly traded stocks. Does anyone out there have such a list (or know who does)? ...)
			The UCLA Fly-Out (So I'm a day late in posting. Apologies. I've been working on my senior thesis and the ball has finally gotten rolling. I guess that is another post though. On to UCLA:I left...)
			Best blog comment of the year? (…comes from Paul Collier, commenting on a Martin Wolf column about the food crisis in the FT. There’s this: The best solution to a problem is often not...)
			Window Dressing, or the Real Deal? (My father flew with budget carrier Tiger Airways from Canberra to Melbourne yesterday, and had the exciting experience of having part of his window fall out....)
			UoC Economist (My colleagues up the road are looking for an economics lecturer. Details over the...)
			Strict deadlines and public humiliation (My co-author Bruce Chapman has substantial administrative responsibilities, which are invariably urgent, and therefore tend to crowd out research. Our...)
			Meat(t1) = (grain(t0))^3 (Lynne Kiesling In a post about how reducing your meat consumption can help you manage food costs, Megan McArdle has the best quote I've seen thus far about the food...)
			TV technology, economics, and my rediscovered love of hockey (Lynne Kiesling Long-time KP readers know that I am from Pittsburgh and I am a hockey fan. Newer readers may not realize that, because I...)
			Shmacts
			Eureka
			Don't Call Me a Philistine, by Bryan Caplan (Unlike the last French arthouse movie I saw, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is excellent. If, like me, you find it hard to believe that the average...)
			The Cynical Case for the Gas Tax Holiday: From EconLog to the NYT, by Bryan Caplan (I've finally made the Gray Lady: Today's New York Times features my op-ed inspired by Sunday's post, "I'll Shill...)
			The $.30 Question, by Bryan Caplan (Amazon has been charging $19.77 for my book for almost a year. But very recently, they cut the price to $19.47. Why $.30? Why now? Ideas? P.S. If someone who...)
			Wintergreen (As I was growing up, we used to wander in these woods a lot. It was here I learned to identify wintergreen plants — we were able to eat...)
			Moving Harvard? (Greg Mankiw has an intriguing post about whether Harvard could or should leave Massachusetts in response to a proposed MA plan to tax large university and college endowments. Mankiw...)
			Edwards and Clinton: ?Pot, meet Keetle? (Ben Smith at Politico.com relates: Edwards responded sharply to a Clinton aide’s criticism today, intensifying a back-and-forth that began at last...)
			Goodbye, Borat! (He had a good run…. Sacha Baron Cohen to shed Borat persona for good Friday December 21 5:54 PM ET British actor-comedian Sacha Baron Cohen says the time has come to shed...)
			Use a cellphone, Go to jail (New guidelines from British prosecutors: Motorists caught using a hand-held mobile phone while driving could be jailed for two years under tough new guidelines issued...)
			Just don?t do it to a teddy bear! (The second most common name for new baby boys in Britain is “Mohammed.” Just don’t try that with a teddy...)
			The Time is Ripe for Means-Testing (Mauritius has relatively low levels of absolute and relative poverty: less than 1% of the population lives with less than $2 a day and around 8% of the population...)
			Peak Oil Media: Food v. (Bio)fuel, Fast Money saying "It's Supply, Stupid" and Cramer on Ending the Ethanol Mandate (Thanks to TOD reader Tim R. for pointing out this piece on the food v. fuel problem...)
			DrumBeat: May 9, 2008 ('Peak oil' is here. Now what? What does it mean that crude oil is peaking? Essentially it means that the world has used half the oil available to extract and will enter a...)
			Countdown to $200 oil (3) - no gas tax needed...erm, right... (This story is part of my new Countdown to $200 oil series, which is the successor of my earlier, and now terminated by reality, Countdown...)
			Update on S. 2821 and Bartlett's Similar House Legislation (no H.R. number yet as I can tell) (Just an update: http://bartlett.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=90703 Congressman Roscoe G....)
			Gas Tax Holiday Comcs
			Ohio Supreme Court: Beneficiaries Cannot Sue Decedent's Attorney For Estate Tax Negligence (The Ohio Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously held that children could not sue their deceased mother's...)
			Zelinsky: New York's "Convenience of the Employer" Rule Is Unconstitutional (Edward A. Zelinsky (Cardozo) has posted New York's "Convenience of the Employer" Rule Is Unconstitutional, 48 State Tax...)
			McIntyre: UN Code of Conduct on Cooperation in Combating International Tax Evasion (Michael J. McIntyre (Wayne State) has posted United Nations Code of Conduct on Cooperation in Combating...)
			Who's feeling the stress? (Have you ever had one for those days? Your charting software didn't work just right, your Internet connection was doggedly slow, and you forgot to read up on this week's...)
			Pick of the Day: GBP/USD - Trade Update (Our short position was triggered and just before the open of the European trading session this morning, our first profit target was hit as Cable picked up...)
			Friday links: absent edition (Abnormal Returns is going to be taking a short break from blogging. During an earlier break we wrote this post highlighting some additional linkfests worth your time. In...)
			Tuesday links: Sprint Extel? (Is it too soon to start calling the company, Sprint Extel (S)? (WSJ.com) A hedge fund fight over Sears Holdings (SHLD). (ChicagoTribune.com, Market Movers) Google...)
			The Fed, Finally Gets a Grip...for $30 Billion (The Fed is finally getting a grip, and it's only costing $30 billion! That's right: the U.S. sub-prime crisis, a wave that has been gathering strength...)
			Buybacks seem to deter takeovers. (Newswise Business News | Researcher Finds Good Management, Open Market Stock Buy-backs Deter Takeover Attempts: "Firms that buy their stock back on the open market...)
			"Genetic Discrimination: Unfair or Natural?" (Michael Kinsley on the recent vote in congress to ban genetic discrimination by employers and insurance companies: Genetic Discrimination: Unfair or...)
			"Small Business Lending and Bank Competition" (How does local competition in banking impact the volume of small business lending?: Small Business Lending and Bank Competition, by Liz Laderman. FRBSF...)
			Long Cable (Buy GBP/USD at market (9559)Stop Loss= 9429Target=...)
			Close Cable trade (Short Cable TradeExit at 9554Result: -45...)
			What are the benefits of being full professor? (Dan Drezner, who just won the title (congratulations!), gives a list. Oddly he leaves off the most important (only?) benefit, namely that no one can tell...)
			The Man Who Loved China (That's the new Simon Winchester book and it concerns Joseph Needham, who wrote the famous series on the history of science in China and focused the attention of the scholarly...)
			Letter to the NEJM (The issue of off-label prescribing is heating up again. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine by Randall Stafford made the case for greater regulation. I am...)
			Where do the kept women go? (Zubin Jelveh reports: If you're a married woman living in the New York City area, there's a better than 50 percent chance that you don't work, according to a recent...)
			Economist.com on Rents and House Prices
			March Trade Deficit
			Quote of the Day: On a Great Danger Approaching (Today's quote is from a clever commenter in our W/H discussion last week: "With the enemy's approach to Moscow, the Moscovites' view of their...)
			Oil Bubble? (My friend Paul points to this report by Factset, titled: An oil bubble to rival the internet boom. The difficulty with the bubble moniker is determining exactly how much of the price is...)
			Forbes Reporting on the Financial Meltdown Scenario (The idea that I presented in a recent article that we face the risk of a "financial meltdown" is becoming more mainstream. Today Munchau...)
			Samwick Media Watch (I'll be on NPR's Marketplace this evening, putting in my 1% of a share of Bear Stearns stock on the goings-on in financial markets. The theme--is this fair and why should you...)
			Two Problems, One Mathematics (1 of 2) ("Besicovitch insists that I publish; the fact that I was able to forsee interesting mathematical results shows that there must be be something in the theory."...)
			J. S. Mill on Method (1.0 IntroductionJohn Stuart Mill wrote an essay on the methodology of economics or rather, in the language of his day, Political Economy. I look at it in a Whiggish fashion to...)
			75 Skills Every Guy Should Master (Esquire just put up a great collections of things every guy should know. There's a lot of good stuff -- some of it pretty old-school, but still spot on. Here...)
			Good Resource on Derivatives (I recently came across this site called Global Derivatives. They've got some resources that students (and faculty) might find useful: a number of excellent spreadsheet...)
			Studies Show That 87% of All Statistics Are Made up On the Spot (Once again, Scott Adams nails it. ...)
			Exam Blogging (I'm in the midst of giving my Advanced Corporate Finance class their final. Since it's open-book/ open-notes, monitoring costs are almost zero (I just have to check for occasional...)
			Stock Tickers Bleg (I'm working on a project with my students, and need a list of the tickers of ALL publicly traded stocks. Does anyone out there have such a list (or know who does)? ...)
			The UCLA Fly-Out (So I'm a day late in posting. Apologies. I've been working on my senior thesis and the ball has finally gotten rolling. I guess that is another post though. On to UCLA:I left...)
			Best blog comment of the year? (…comes from Paul Collier, commenting on a Martin Wolf column about the food crisis in the FT. There’s this: The best solution to a problem is often not...)
			Window Dressing, or the Real Deal? (My father flew with budget carrier Tiger Airways from Canberra to Melbourne yesterday, and had the exciting experience of having part of his window fall out....)
			UoC Economist (My colleagues up the road are looking for an economics lecturer. Details over the...)
			Strict deadlines and public humiliation (My co-author Bruce Chapman has substantial administrative responsibilities, which are invariably urgent, and therefore tend to crowd out research. Our...)
			Gambling & government in Victoria (I?ve been too busy to follow the recent news on gambling contracts in Victoria in detail. But there is a smell around this issue that makes me suspicious.An Upper...)
			Meat(t1) = (grain(t0))^3 (Lynne Kiesling In a post about how reducing your meat consumption can help you manage food costs, Megan McArdle has the best quote I've seen thus far about the food...)
			TV technology, economics, and my rediscovered love of hockey (Lynne Kiesling Long-time KP readers know that I am from Pittsburgh and I am a hockey fan. Newer readers may not realize that, because I...)
			Internet cafe plus
			Shmacts
			Eureka
			Listen to the Children, by Bryan Caplan (Here's a deeply important passage from my favorite survey of the time diary literature:One of Galinsky's more surprising findings centered around a question...)
			The Cynical Case for the Gas Tax Holiday: From EconLog to the NYT, by Bryan Caplan (I've finally made the Gray Lady: Today's New York Times features my op-ed inspired by Sunday's post, "I'll Shill...)
			The $.30 Question, by Bryan Caplan (Amazon has been charging $19.77 for my book for almost a year. But very recently, they cut the price to $19.47. Why $.30? Why now? Ideas? P.S. If someone who...)
			Wintergreen (As I was growing up, we used to wander in these woods a lot. It was here I learned to identify wintergreen plants — we were able to eat...)
			Uh oh...
			The left eats its own?
			"Lessons from the Great Depression" (Updated) (I gave a speech last night to the Phi Beta Kappa Association of the Mid-South on "Lessons from the Great Depression" and promised my hosts that I would...)
			Keynes, Galbraith & Schumpeter
			No Such Thing as a 23-Cent Pizza (Matt Ryan explains. NB--One of the commenters on Matt's post points out that the time people were willing to stand in line for a cheap pizza indicates they value...)
			Complements (In the same vein as Art's recent post on cross-price elasticity of demand: Howard Gendron stopped driving his 28-foot cabin cruiser on Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay two years ago...)
			Edwards and Clinton: ?Pot, meet Keetle? (Ben Smith at Politico.com relates: Edwards responded sharply to a Clinton aide’s criticism today, intensifying a back-and-forth that began at last...)
			Goodbye, Borat! (He had a good run…. Sacha Baron Cohen to shed Borat persona for good Friday December 21 5:54 PM ET British actor-comedian Sacha Baron Cohen says the time has come to shed...)
			Use a cellphone, Go to jail (New guidelines from British prosecutors: Motorists caught using a hand-held mobile phone while driving could be jailed for two years under tough new guidelines issued...)
			Just don?t do it to a teddy bear! (The second most common name for new baby boys in Britain is “Mohammed.” Just don’t try that with a teddy...)
			Workers and Employers (by Don Boudreaux) (Let's reflect on an implicit presumption -- indeed, I'm sure, a presumption held unawares -- that undergirds many familiar discussions of workers'...)
			The Time is Ripe for Means-Testing (Mauritius has relatively low levels of absolute and relative poverty: less than 1% of the population lives with less than $2 a day and around 8% of the population...)
			Hillary's Scorched Earth Policy
			Capital Gains: Is it laffer curve or boom and bust that determines amounts of capital gains realized?
			Treasury Department Advice to Auditors (and Others) Regarding Audit Profession (In a four-hour meeting, the Treasury Department came up with a list of recommendations to improve the audit profession;...)
			Gas Tax Holiday Comcs
			Mass. Considers 2.5% Excise Tax on College Endowments > $1 Billion (From yesterday's Boston Globe: Lawmakers Target $1b Endowments; Exempt Status of Schools Debated, by Peter Schworm & Matt Viser:...)
			Cindy McCain Refuses to Release Her Tax Returns, Even If Her Husband Is Elected President (Cindy McCain announced on the Today show yesterday that she will never release her tax returns, even if her...)
			House Passes Housing Tax Bill (The House yesterday approved The Housing Assistance Tax Act (H.R. 5720), as an amendment to the American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act (H.R. 3221), .by a...)
			ABA Tax Section May Meeting (The ABA Tax Section's three-day May Meeting continues today at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. A list of Tax Profs with speaking roles today, and their topics, is...)
			Who's feeling the stress? (Have you ever had one for those days? Your charting software didn't work just right, your Internet connection was doggedly slow, and you forgot to read up on this week's...)
			Pick of the Day: GBP/USD - Trade Update (Our short position was triggered and just before the open of the European trading session this morning, our first profit target was hit as Cable picked up...)
			Tuesday links: Sprint Extel? (Is it too soon to start calling the company, Sprint Extel (S)? (WSJ.com) A hedge fund fight over Sears Holdings (SHLD). (ChicagoTribune.com, Market Movers) Google...)
			The Fed, Finally Gets a Grip...for $30 Billion (The Fed is finally getting a grip, and it's only costing $30 billion! That's right: the U.S. sub-prime crisis, a wave that has been gathering strength...)
			Drivers are feeling the pain (USA Today reports on how high gas prices are causing motorists to drive less, a trend that looks set to accelerate in the months ahead.A related story about how resale...)
			MONEY DEBATES (Does money matter? The answer depends on who's talking. Suffice to say, however, Milton Friedman's dictum that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon is now debatable...)
			Buybacks seem to deter takeovers. (Newswise Business News | Researcher Finds Good Management, Open Market Stock Buy-backs Deter Takeover Attempts: "Firms that buy their stock back on the open market...)
			"Learning ... Turns Out to Have Dangerous Side Effects" (When nature maximizes survival under constraint, learning is just another parameter in the equation: Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn?t...)
			What If We'd Been on the Gold Standard? (James Hamilton submits: If the U.S. had decided to go back on the gold standard in 2006, where would we be today? That's a question my friend Randy Parker...)
			HudBay Minerals: Takeover Unlikely Despite Disappointing Earnings (FP Trading Desk submits: For all those Hudbay Minerals Inc. (HBMFF.PK) investors banking on a takeover bid to bring life back to the...)
			Long Cable (Buy GBP/USD at market (9559)Stop Loss= 9429Target=...)
			Long Cable (Buy GBP/USD at market (9559)Stop Loss= 9429Target=...)
			Long Cable (Buy GBP/USD at market (9559)Stop Loss= 9429Target=...)
			Close Cable trade (Short Cable TradeExit at 9554Result: -45...)
			Close Cable trade (Short Cable TradeExit at 9554Result: -45...)
			Close Cable trade (Short Cable TradeExit at 9554Result: -45...)
			Long Cable (Buy GBP/USD at market (9559)Stop Loss= 9429Target=...)
			Long Cable (Buy GBP/USD at market (9559)Stop Loss= 9429Target=...)
			Long Cable (Buy GBP/USD at market (9559)Stop Loss= 9429Target=...)
			Close Cable trade (Short Cable TradeExit at 9554Result: -45...)