Finance Geek

Last Wednesday night’s House tally on the Democratic stimulus package, where not a single Republican voted in favor, was another shot across the bow for this incredibly unmanageable $900 billion behemoth of a program that truly will not stimulate the economy. Sure, the Democrats won on a party-line count. But Team Obama is now regrouping in the face of mounting criticism of this package.

GOP economist Martin Feldstein revoked his prior support of a stimulus plan in Wednesday’s Washington Post. “In its current form,” Feldstein wrote, “[the plan] does too little to raise national spending and employment. It would be better for the Senate to delay legislation for a month, or even two, if that’s what it takes to produce a much better bill. We cannot afford an $800 billion mistake.”

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The following chart is a selection of some announcements of job cuts since the beginning of the year. Some numbers are estimates.

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Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to bjy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The upaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.

Karl Marx, 1867

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As if you needed further proof the economy is bad, here comes the Super Bowl: Turns out even the big game isn’t immune to the slowdown. True, NBC is expected to sell out 33.5 minutes of commercial time at an average rate of $3 million per 30 seconds, acco

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With the financial system still in desperate need of repair, policymakers continue to rack their brains for possible solutions to dealing with the mountain of toxic debt on the banks’ balance sheets. …

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Without mincing words, President Obama strongly condemned Wall Street’s $18.4 billion bonus pool for 2008, calling it “the height of irresponsibility” and “shameful.” We couldn’t agree more, as detailed here. …

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Update: Amazon shares were up 18% in an otherwise grim tape Friday morning after the Internet retailer posted much better-than-expected fourth-quarter results. Clearly, investors are putting a premium on Amazon’s growth and execution, e

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From Silicon Alley Insider, Jan. 29, 2009: Amazon (AMZN) released earnings and hit a home run. Revenue guidance strong, but operating income guidance low. Shares up 7% before the call.Q4 Revenue: $6.70 Billion vs. $6.44 billion consensus.Q4 EPS: $0.52 vs.

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NEC will cut 20,000 workers, joining a slew of other Japanese corporate heavyweights who are slashing jobs to survive the deepening global downturn. NEC’s net loss for October-December swelled to 130 billion yen ($1.46 billion) from 5.2 billion yen a year earlier as the global slump hit semiconductors and other businesses.

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Fear has driven money toward the Treasury market, sending bill, note and bond prices soaring, but there will be plenty of pain to go around once the bubble pops.

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As a bruising session draws to a close, there is still no clear end to the market’s woes, and no one knows what will happen next. Yet our players see reasons for hope.

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In the early 1980’s, the Wall Street Journal asked liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith and conservative economist Milton Friedman to predict the macroeconomic trends over the next two years. Both agreed that inflation would rise above 10%, and both accused the other of obtaining his prediction by reading chicken entrails. Both were wrong about inflation, but both were right about the chicken entrails.

Galbraith and Friedman were two of the leading late twentieth century experts in macroeconomics — the study of the national or global economy. They applied different macroeconomic theories to make their predictions. Both predictions were completely wrong, which indicates that the theories from which the predictions were made were also wrong. Today, the United State government is about to embark on a vast macroeconomic experiment to prevent the global economy from collapsing into depression. How can we tell if the course of action recommended by a given economist today is any better than reading entrails? Basing an action on a macroeconomic theory that is wrong is acting at random: the action may make matters worse, much worse that doing nothing. If you don’t know how a machine works, don’t mess with it.

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An important element of Martin Luther King’s dream is becoming a reality: to an ever-greater extent people are not judged “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” On Inauguration Day, as with the aftermath of the election itself, the country echoed with pride at the ascent of the first man of color into the White House. And yet, on both occasions, the capital markets crumbled in fear at the likely price tag of his proposed initiatives.

According to Wikipedia, the expression beggar thy neighbor “was originally devised to characterize policies of trying to cure domestic depression and unemployment by shifting effective demand away from imports onto domestically produced goods, either through tariffs and quotas on imports, or by competitive devaluation.” More generally, it can refer to any wealth transfer from our neighbors to ourselves, in which the consequence is less aggregate wealth for all: a bigger slice of a smaller pie.

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The stock market’s recent winning streak came to a screeching halt Thursday, with the Dow falling 226 points, or 2.7% while the S&P and Nasdaq shed 3.3% and 3.2%, respectively.While the market doesn’t move in a logical fashion on a day-to-day basis, s

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WATERLOO — Having recently finished his latest phase of his famous Sistine Chapel project, Paco Rosic is tired, and he doesn’t mind sharing it.

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