Their home, meanwhile, which was originally valued at $585,000, had depreciated severely in three scant years. It was now essentially worthless at $270,000. Attorney Wajahat Ali This is the dramatic and sad kind of situation […]
Category: Money
Google stands Alone Before China
It’s all about profit, and I understand where the silence is coming from, but they are missing the long-term picture. [Chinese leaders’] end game is to extract as much technology out of American companies as […]
Gene Munster tells a Good Story, But is it Believable?
IApple’s mobile phone business would go the same way as the Mac did in the 1980s and 1990s.
'Walk Away from Your Mortgage'
Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said […]
Recession and the Recovery Problem
I sit outside the auto repair shop waiting for the brake light switch on my aging Toyota Corolla to be fixed. I type on the Nokia N97 smartphonne, on which I also have been reading news. I had blogged that the N97 would get a second chance. The iPhone 3GS is on ice, so to speak. But my N97 experience is topic for another post.
My interest here is the news I was reading in the New York Times about an analyst report suggesting that the economy is starting to recover. It’s not. But first, the Times asserts: “A measure of supplier deliveries, rising stock prices, an increase in consumer expectations, a jump in building permits and the ‘interest rate spread’ bolstered the index in August.”
Reich’s Right: No Economic Recovery in Sight
U Cal Berkley prof Robert Reich astutely and concisely sums up the prospects for economic revival in commentary “When Will the Recovery Begin? Never.” I saw it today at Salon, but Robert posted to his blog on July 9.
Other economic observers who talk about a recovery underway go oddly together with reality. There is no recovery now, and there isn’t going to be one in the foreseeable future.
Antitrust Primer: Google and Microsoft
Have you wondered why Microsoft quietly accepted yet another two years of government oversight? Simply put, Microsoft doesn’t want to end up with the problems looming over Google.
There has been much buzz over the last couple weeks about the US Justice Department looking closely at Google. The rumors used the “A” and “M” words, antitrust and monopoly, to describe how trustbusters view Google’s search dominance. Today’s Wall Street Journal claims that the Obama Administration has put together an antitrust watchlist, on which there is Google’s name.
The China Question
Is the American era over? I begin to wonder if the answer is yes. History is the reason. In 1914, the British Empire spanned the globe, and London was the financial capitol (eh, capital would work, too) of the world. Four years later, England’s fortunes had changed. The country had shifted much of its manufacturing production to the war and spent quite a bit of its capital supporting European allies. Meanwhile, the United States picked up manufacturing slack and monetary might. Could America’s fortunes change so quickly?
'If Hints Were Sledgehammers'
It’s not a great depression, neither is it a great recession we’re going through now. At the Brite conference this week, Umair Haque called it a great ‘compression,’ as an economy built on perceived value […]
Dow's Fall From Grace, Yesterday and Today
It has been 513 calendar days since the stock market peaked on Oct. 9, 2007. Since then, the S.&P. 500 is down 56 percent and the Dow is off 53 percent. On Jan. 29, 1931—the […]
Mazda Does Right Thing
We couldn’t run the risk of damaging the brand name that Mazda worked so hard over the years to develop. Jeremy Barnes About the destruction of $100 million worth of cars.
Let the Bears Eat Bear Stearns
I agree with Gretchen Morgenson, writing for the New York Times. The Fed shouldn’t bail out Bear Stearns. The fed crossed a line by keeping afloat a major architect of the housing debacle.
I wrote my first blog post about the housing bubble in August 2005, a year after deciding not to buy a home in the Washington, DC suburb of Bowie. It was already clear to me in summer 2004 that something akin to a repeat of the dot-com bubble was taking place in the housing market.
Had we bought in 2004, we would likely hold a mortgage that exceeds the house’s reduced value. We could never have moved to San Diego.