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Monday, August 30, 2010

Stuff You Should Read

-Via Dealbreaker, quarterly letters from
1) Ackman (Pershing Square)
2) Loeb (Third Point) - sizzling!

"So long as our leaders tell us that we must trust them to regulate and redistribute our way back to prosperity, we will not break out of this economic quagmire." - Dan Loeb

- Paul Kedrosky simply explains how charts and data can be misleading, using a chart from Arnold Schwarzenegger's recent WSJ Op-ed as an example.  I have to admit that I fell for this chart at first too, which is why Kedrosky's point is a must read.

-via Barry Ritholtz, the Periodic Table of Wall Street Criminal Elements

- Ritholtz:  Your Info Is Not Private as a Bidder on EBAY

-Howard Lindzon with the best post title of the month:  "The Internet Makes Me Pee Less"


-KD

4 comments:

wcw said...

The alternative, of course, is to trust Dan Loeb.

Kid Dynamite said...

WCW - do you disagree with Loeb's implication in his next line from the letter, where he sarcastically notes

"One can hope only that this Administration, composed of brilliant academics that have had experience in creating the very regulation and overseeing the very institutions that have failed, has learned from its mistakes and will set us down the right path."

???

Anonymous said...

Re: the Kedrosky post, I see his point. But let's recognize that the original chart is factually correct and more importantly isn't materially misleading (in my opinion). Let's remember that either way, the gap between the public and private numbers is still huge, and that's what's 'wrong.' Government is one of the few sectors where employment is growing. (Check out Fairfax, VA's ultra low unemployment rate. Wow.) And most importantly: is this growth in government a good thing? Yikes.

wcw said...

No. I'm near the head of the line among the attack-the-technocrats-for-bad-technocracy brigade. But the idea that regulation and redistribution guarantee economic quagmire founders on the shoals of Eisenhower's economy, not to mention Denmark's.

Letter's like Loeb's make me want to go long beta in a big way. Just like BP paper, the kernel of truth here would seem deeply overbought.

I can't quite do it yet. I want the markets to get a good, long look at whom Dan Loeb voted for first.