Flashman Letters

: Charlie Rose interviews Seth Klarman

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Charlie Rose interviews Seth Klarman

Found via My Investing Notebook.

Link: An Interview with Seth Klarman and Charlie Rose

Posted by Joe Koster at 11/26/2011

Labels: Charlie Rose, Seth Klarman

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via www.valueinvestingworld.com

1 in 4 women cannot possibly need mental health drugs - Yes - it should more like 3 in 4...

According to a report from MedCo, a pharmacy benefit manager, one out of every four women [in the US] has a prescription for some form of mental health medication, whether it's for depression, ADHD, anxiety or something else.

via www.newscientist.com

Grayson Carter is an ungrateful bitch. An old school Spy magazine writer in Tina brown's Newsweek

The second biggest problem is the way each issue begins with a miles-long slog of columns by A-list writers eager to champion the incontrovertible and rehash the already thoroughly hashed. Recently writing of the Arab-world uprisings, Stephen L. Carter risks this pronouncement: “In the nations where the mighty have already fallen, we do not know how matters will play out.” Guess what else? Paul Begala is troubled by the anti-intellectualism of the Republican Party. Niall Ferguson has discovered that, thanks to technology, “the human race is interconnected as never before.” Bernard-Henri Lévy summons the moral courage to observe that “there is, in the spectacle of Gaddafi’s lynching, something revolting.”

via www.vanityfair.com

BHL sur la crise - what an asshole..... Really? French people buy this rubbish?

Rome and Athens, epicenters of the economic and financial storm currently shaking Europe and the world.

You read it right: Rome and Athens.

In other words, the two cradles of Europe.

Two of the three sources (Jerusalem, thank heavens, not yet included) of its ethics and its religions.

[etcetera]

First, it is Europe itself that is in crisis. Not finance. Not the economy. Europe. Its culture. Its genius. Its unconscious conscience. Its immemorial and its memory. All that makes up its bases and its origins. Its heart, that beats more and more faintly. Its soul. Its common and hidden grammar. The distinction, that it invented, between law and right. Or between man and citizen. The articulation, that is its own, of multiple forms of the Multiple and of the unique name of the One.

In short, its being. Its substance. To such an extent that, in order to understand what is happening, to know what it entails when we speak of the crisis of the debt or of the euro, to understand, just to understand, what the popular movements of protest currently shaking Rome and Athens, the two great capitals of European intelligence, are saying, we should be rereading Gibbon, Humboldt, or even Polybius — these theoreticians of the fate and the fall of the Athenian paradigm or the Roman road — rather than Friedman or Keynes.

via ftalphaville.ft.com

Will Greece unravel by Christmas?

If Greece gets worse in the next few weeks, Europe had already better have a plan about what steps it will take to defend banks in peripheral Europe.  Once Greece goes, even the least sophisticated households in other countries will know what the consequences for depositors will be.  Deposit withdrawals, after all, are one of the kinds of actions that different sectors of the economy will take to protect their interests in the face of a crisis, even though this behavior increases the likelihood of the crisis. 

This is simply part of the logic of sovereign financial distress – declining credibility causes stakeholders to act in ways that reduce credibility further.    What’s more, deterioration in the political process is part of financial distress at the sovereign level.  Remember, as Keynes pointed out back in 1922, that resolving these kinds of crises is always political – it is about which sector of the economy (or class) ends up paying for the adjustment.  

Workers can pay in the form of high unemployment and declining wages, the middle class can pay by having its savings inflated away, private businesses can pay in the form of confiscatory taxes and expropriation, creditors can pay through forced debt forgiveness, and so on, but ultimately someone must pay.  Politics becomes about deciding which groups will be forced to foot the bill.  Historical precedents suggest that political fault lines are likely to develop as different groups organizes politically to protect themselves. 

via mpettis.com

Very Depressing - Worldwise: Live From Athens

Yanis Varoufakis University of Athens, yanisvaroufakis.eu

Henry Farrell Crooked Timber, George Washington University

Worldwise: Live From Athens

via bloggingheads.tv

The Difference Between Northern and Southern Europe -

via www.thereformedbroker.com

Wir wollen brot! | Bill Mitchell - Excellent

Mervyn King said that the usual concept of “lender of last resort”:

… is a million miles away from the ECB buying sovereign debt of national countries, which is used and seen as a mechanism for financing the current-account deficit of those countries, which inevitably, if things go wrong, will create liabilities for the surplus countries. In other words, it would be a mechanism of transfers from the surplus to the deficit countries. That’s why the European Central Bank feels, and with total justification, that it is not the job of a central bank to do something which a government could perfectly well do itself but doesn’t particularly want to admit to doing …

The only circumstance in which looking at the data for the euro area as a whole has merit is in realising that actually the euro area does have the resources, if you were to regard it as a single country, to make appropriate transfers within itself. It doesn’t actually need transfers from the rest of the world. But the whole issue is, do they wish to make transfers within the euro area or not? That is not something that a central bank can decide for itself. It is something that only the governments of the euro area can come to a conclusion on. And that is the big challenge that they face.

I agree with the Governor that the term “LOLR” is being misused in the current debate. But I disagree that the ECB’s job is not to “do something which a government could perfectly well do itself but doesn’t particularly want to admit to doing”. That statement is catogorically incorrect when applied to the governments in the EMU.

The member states in the EMU cannot spend with funding that spending via taxation and or debt-issuance. The only institution in the EMU that can spend without recourse to prior funding is the ECB. That is the consequence of the flawed design of the monetary system that the neo-liberal conservatives in Europe forced upon the member states at the inception of the union.

It might not be the job of the ECB as they define it to bail out governments but it is that or the system collapses. It is clearly the job of the ECB to ensure there is financial stability in the monetary system that is it as the “centre” of. Central banks exist to guarantee financial stability. At present, there is a major risk of financial mayhem in the Eurozone and that has to be a primary focus of the ECB.

via bilbo.economicoutlook.net

Click to link: True and False Lessons Drawn from the Structural Slump

True and False Lessons Drawn from the Structural Slump (Video)

Speaker:	Edmund S. Phelps, Director, Center on Capitalism and Society and McVickar Professor of Political Economy, Columbia University; 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics
Presider:	Andrew Ross Sorkin, Columnist, New York Times; Co-Anchor, CNBC’s Squawk Box

November 21, 2011
General Meeting: True and False Lessons Drawn from the Structural Slump

Edmund S. Phelps, professor of political economy at Columbia University, discusses the causes of the economic slump in the United States.

via www.cfr.org

Is It Really Possible to Decouple GDP Growth from Energy Growth? No.... The environment is screwed.

 

Figure 1. Growth in world energy consumption (based on BP data) and growth in world real GDP

Prior to 2000, world real GDP (based on USDA Economic Research Institute data) was indeed growing faster than energy use, as measured by BP Statistical Data. Between 1980 and 2000, world real GDP growth averaged a little under 3% per year, and world energy growth averaged a little under 2% per year, so GDP growth increased about 1% more per year than energy use. Since 2000, energy use has grown approximately as fast as world real GDP–increases for both have averaged about 2.5% per year growth. This is not what we have been told to expect.

If GDP growth and energy use are closely tied, it will be even more difficult to meet CO2 emission goals than most have expected. Without huge efficiency savings, a reduction in emissions (say, 80% by 2050) is likely to require a similar percentage reduction in world GDP. Because of the huge disparity in real GDP between the developed nations and the developing nations, the majority of this GDP reduction would likely need to come from developed nations. It is difficult to see this happening without economic collapse.

 

via www.theoildrum.com