Toluu : The Big Picture

The Big Picture

Macro Perspective on the Capital Markets, Economy, Geopolitics, Technology, and Digital Media

National Unemployment Rate Since 1948Today

Nice interactive graphic from WSJ: Scroll over any month, and it shows the National unemployment rate in percentage terms — since 1948.

click for interactive graphic

Updated: 07/02/2009

Robert Shiller: How Animal Spirits Drive the EconomyToday

Robert J. Shiller - Robert J. Shiller is the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics, and Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University. He is also professor of Finance and Fellow at the International Center for Finance at Yale School of Management. He has written about financial markets, financial innovation, behavioral economics, macroeconomics, real estate, and statistical methods, as well as on public attitudes, opinions, and moral judgments regarding markets.

Asian Officials Push Back Against Savings Glut TheoryToday

“The crisis originated from Wall Street and many indisputable facts have established that micro factors had played an overwhelmingly important role in causing this crisis. People outside China need a better insight into the high savings rate in China.”
-Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan

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Gee, why do you think they would be upset about hare-brained rationales that duck blame for the crisis?

Bernanke’s 2005 global savings glut nonsense was an ill-conceived attempt to shift responsibility for U.S. policy mistakes to Asia. Of course, China’s trade surpluses had an impact on the global economy — but it can hardly be blamed for Easy Al’s ultra-low rates.

WSJ:

“Asian officials and scholars are pushing back against the notion that their countries’ high savings helped cause the financial crisis by flooding the world with money, arguing that lax U.S. financial regulation bears the brunt of the blame.

“Asians financed cheap consumption in the rest of the world, this is what they say. This is something I just cannot understand,” Supachai Panitchpakdi, the head of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and a former Thai government official, told a conference Friday. “This is another theory we have to debunk. Asians have not been over-saving and under-consu

BRAINSTORMToday

BRAINSTORM is a work by Long Island sculptor Alex Wagman.

Unlike most of Wagman’s other statues, which were cast from bronze, it is made of fiberglass. Why?

“I can’t afford to do it in bronze,” he says.

For Brainstorm, “I sprayed the surface several times with an epoxy in which I added silver metal powder. Then I used abrasives on it, and it looks like polished metal.”

Banning Short SellingToday

We have a bull market excess stupidity.

Now that I think about it, this could very well be the longest bull market in history, running as it has for several 100,000 years.

The latest manifestation of this intellectual failure is the new government proposals to ban or radically restrict short selling.

Of all the anti-free-market proposals out there, turning equities into a one way bet is by far the least defendable, most ignorant, most damaging to the markets we have seen.

NYT excerpt:

“They have been reviled as the bad hats of Wall Street, nefarious traders who cashed in on the market collapse and, some insist, helped precipitate it. Now short-sellers, the market skeptics who correctly called last year’s downturn, are coming under even more unwanted scrutiny, this time from federal regulators. The Securities and Exchange Commission appears poised to reverse itself and reinstate rules that would make shorting stocks — that is, betting their prices will decline — somewhat more difficult.

Whether the S.E.C. will go far enough to satisfy the many critics of short-sellers is far from certain. The controversial role of these investors has divided not only the financial industry, but also federal regulators. As the S.E.C. considers its options, the debate is heating up. Hedge funds and big pension funds argue that short-selling is vital to modern