Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Links of the day

Overcapacity in US manufacturing sector...Marketwatch's summary of the Commerce Department's report on manufacturing in January states that "Many economists believe the slump in the factory sector is a temporary slowdown, caused by excessive inventories in a few sectors that should be worked off in a few months"; I don't agree. There is significant overcapacity in a number of sectors that will need to be restructured and it won't happen in a few months.

A couple of other quotes from the manufacturing report:
"Demand for U.S.-made manufactured goods dropped 5.6% in January, the largest decline since July 2000"

"Orders for durable goods fell 8.7%, revised down from last week's 7.8% estimate"

The truth about the Osborne effect...from an insider...

"Stansky's Monster: A Critical Examination of Fidelity Magellan's 'Frankenfund,'"...by Ross Miller...the thesis is this: " if the active component of Magellan were considered as a standalone market-neutral investment, its investors would have lost at least 50% of their money between 2002 and 2004"...an explosive assertion, in my mind...

Teaching Un-Normal Economics..."
a little experience with normal economics shows that "market failure" is a fundamental analytic category in economics, whereas "government failure" is scarcely used, and when used is more frequently used in a sense meaning failure to achieve its goals or failure relative to other (imperfect) institutional arrangements. Built into the normal science, then, is a double-standard that is prejudicial against free markets. Other aspects of "normal" economics are prejudicial against free markets. Model building, for example, the exalted mode of discourse, tends to eclipse some of the important virtues of free markets. I would even say that model building tends to render the very idea of freedom nugatory—that is, the idea of freedom is vital because life is not like an equilibrium model"...

Mutual Fund = Index Fund + Hedge Fund...yep, I'd say so...

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