From the New York Times: Japan’s legions of robots, the world’s largest fleet of mechanized workers, are being idled as the country suffers its deepest recession in more than a generation as consumers worldwide cut spending on cars and gadgets. At a large Yaskawa Electric factory, where robots once churned out more robots, a lone…
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Are You Paying a Hidden Tax to the High Frequency Traders
This is a developing story, but one which has all the potential to explode if the right people hear about it. I don’t have a strong opinion on this stuff yet, but I thought I’d put John Mauldin‘s take on the table and let everyone make up their own minds. From Thoughts From the Frontline:…
The Man Who Crashed the World in Vanity Fair
As we’ve discussed before, AIG‘s little hidden hedge fund, Financial Products Group, not only took down the world’s largest insurance company, it had a huge hand in the global meltdown last fall. While some of AIG’s counter-parties came out pretty unscathed (Goldman Sachs), the rest of the financial complex surely did not. While there were…
Mirror Mirror on the Wall…
Which retailer sucks most of all? EconomPic puts it in picture form for the month of June 2009. Warning: This graph is violently depressing and is intended for mature audiences only! I suppose the answer would be Abercrombie and Fitch…20 someodd percent teenage unemployment, go figure! Be sure to visit EconomPic for more delicious chart candy.
Red Flags in the Sky
“He that voluntarily continues in ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces” – Samuel Johnson If Bernie Madoff was the Harlem Globetrotters of stock fraud (undefeated for decades), then Ross Mandell and his Sky Capital crew are the Washington Generals. Mandell has been in trouble with regulators and officials on and off…
Eric Jackson on The Best Corporate Boards
If you don’t know Eric Jackson, he’s an activist shareholder through his fund Ironfire Capital and he also writes a terrific blog called Breakout Performance. When a knowledgeable activist talks governance and the quality of corporate boards, I try to listen and learn something. Jackson came upon something interesting during the course of his research…
Fox Biz: Macke Rumor Completely False
Sorry to anyone who had their hopes up, but according to a Fox Business rep, Jeff Macke will not be appearing on the network and there are no plans in the works for this at this time. The Car People, incidentally, had no comment…
Taibbi v Goldman Redux
“Goldman Sachs…is like a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone Magazine Matt Taibbi is the reporter who has just exploded into the public consciousness with his brutal Goldman Sachs Controls the Universe piece in, of all places, Rolling Stone…
The Two Horsemen of the ETF Apocalypse: UMM and DMM
Allow me to introduce you to an investment product so disgracefully ridiculous that one could only assume it was launched on a dare. Very quietly, on June 30th 2009, some firm called MacroMarkets LLC (co-founded by the otherwise well-regarded Robert Shiller) launched two ETFs that purport to be able to give investors 300% of the return or it’s inverse of the…
Melt It Like Beckham: Major Changes for the Indian Gold Market
Very quietly, two developments occurred in India over the last week that could have major implications for the gold market. Both of these developments could portend drastic changes in gold demand from a key market, just as the inflationistas believe they are at the threshold of a paradigm shift in the precious metal’s pricing. First…
