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Monday, January 05, 2009

Quick, but Good

My two favorite financial bloggers each have questions worth looking at:

1) from Paul Kedrosky: "Is Financial History Bunk?"
I've been arguing for the past year that generally, it IS bunk - it's useless to compare the AVERAGE length of past recessions, because we've never had a situation like this, or even close to this current crisis! This is especially scary when you consider that we're relying on a true academic, Ben Bernanke, to get us out of this mess... Kedrosky also points out that the tiny sample size also renders any comparisons highly suspect.

2) from Barry Ritholtz: "Why don't policymakers respond to rising markets?"
Indeed... and this gets back to yesterday's point which I discussed in the Lewis/Einhorn article about the mistake of trying to form policy to protect falling stock prices.

And oh - if there was any doubt about how completely incompetent the SEC was - the WSJ today reports on how they investigated Bernie Madoff at least EIGHT times, but failed to detect the massive fraud that he was perpetuating. Nice work boys.

-KD

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Shorting treasuries sure seems like a good idea right now. Yields are at their lowest point in 50 years? Wow.