Friday, April 06, 2007

Links of the day

Calculated Risk's analysis of the US employment report for March includes this chart:

Not than any US president can meaningfully affect job growth, but there certainly has been a lot of blather in the main stream media about how there was a "jobless recovery" and it was all Bush's fault. From the CR post: "The gray area represents the expected job growth (from 6 million to 10 million jobs over the four year term). Job growth has been solid for the last two years and is near the top of the expected range." Bzzt...no jobless recovery here...

The dog ate the escrow payments...UBS sues New century on the basis that "
New Century and its subsidiaries had agreed to collect borrowers' mortgage payments and deposit them into a third-party account, pending New Century complying with its obligation to buy back some of its loans. But New Century failed to deposit more than $3.8 million in mortgage payments that the company received from borrowers on loans purchased and owned by UBS, according to the complaint. UBS also claims New Century has failed to account for missing escrow payments made by borrowers"...

More followup on Blackstone IPO...Michael Lewis of Liar's Poker fame backs me up on my assertions regarding this IPO:

"With the shrewdest and most sophisticated investors armed with essentially unlimited capital, any company that is available to the public is almost by definition an inferior asset, i.e., an asset that the private-equity people have no interest in. We may not have arrived at the point where the publicly traded shares in a company are a sure sign that those shares are a poor investment. But that's the obvious, ultimate destination"...


More Evidence of Weak Productivity Growth...Dean Baker at Beat the Press says "we're looking at another quarter with productivity growth in the 1.0 percent range. Productivity growth has averaged 1.6 percent since the third quarter of 2004. The Wall Street Journal has been way out front on the evidence of a productivity slowdown, having run two major pieces in the last half year. Thus far, this topic has been largely ignored in the rest of the media. Productivity is the main long-run determinant of living standards. The productivity upturn in 1995 was rightly huge news. The evidence that it may be coming to an end is also huge news"...I need to study this subject further to have an informed opinion...

I found The Indian Economy Blog today and a post titled Beyond Bangalore with the thesis that India's key cities are expanding as rapidly as possible and therefore foreign companies looking to set up operations in India should be looking at second tier cities as good choices for setting up shop...

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