Economy Blog

I have spent the past week doing a series of presentations with business partner John Mauldin in South Africa. A rather busy schedule, together with poor Internet access, has resulted in my not being able to assimilate all the necessary material for “Words from the Wise”. My apologies for any inconvenience, but rest assured that the normal blogging service will be resumed this week.

Please visit my website (by clicking on the heading above) for the full article, as well as other interesting investment snippets.
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Lingerie Designer Reveals Secrets of Success

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Dr Pepper Snapple Pops Up on Wall Street

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Dr Pepper Snapple Pops Up on Wall Street

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Japan reports growth figures, and China releases April data.…
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I just came across a site called TimeTube which is a new mashup from Dipity.

Move Over, Warren Buffett

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My pal James Pethokoukis is a 2002 Jeopardy! champion — so I don’t lightly challenge his knowledge of either the esoteric trivia or data driven facts.

However, when he — along with Messrs. Wesbury, M…
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China Fish Supplier a Full-Scale Ag Play

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The US has plenty of problems with Venezuela’s mentally troubled dictator Hugo Chavez. The most recent confrontation has been over Chavez financing guerrillas in neighboring Columbia. While the two nations throw bricks at one another, China has slipped in a side door and cut a huge refinery deal with the Latin American country. Under the terms about 400,000 barrels a day will be produced in Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt. The new refinery there will be built by the Chinese. According to Bloomberg “The venture between Petroleos de Venezuela SA and China National Petroleum Corp. will pump oil from an area called…
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Rupert Murdoch of News Corp (NWS) pulled his $580 million bid for large Long Island paper “Newsday” currently owned by The Tribune Company. Cablevision (CVC), which has a large portion of its subscriber base on Long Island, has bid $650 million The turn of events is extremely odd. Murdoch could have saved tens of million of dollars each year by combining key functions at “Newsday” with his NYC daily “The New York Post”. The deal would have made both papers much more profitable. Cablevision gains no ready economies of scale by combining a cable system with a newspaper. The company’s…
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China Watch Mail Bag

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Soros Blames ‘Super-Bubble’ on Reagan

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Soros Blames ‘Super-Bubble’ on Reagan

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Oh Steve:

[It’s like] being a noodle salesman in Nagasaki when they dropped the A-bomb - not a lot of noodles left, and not a lot of people either.

My prediction: This will not end well….
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John Hechinger reports that lawmakers in Massachussetts are considering a 2.5% tax on the portion of college endowments that exceed $1 billion. Such a tax would raise $1.4 billion a year, with 60% of it coming from Harvard.
Greg Mankiw grumbles that Harvard could or should simply move somewhere else if that happened; you can file that idea under "extremely improbable". Right-wingers always say that if you tax people or institutions with money they won’t pay more tax, they’ll just move; they’re rarely proved right.
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America may well be only halfway through the house-price bust; so says this week’s Economist:Mr Bernanke’s maps use figures from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO). Its statistics have broad geographic reach and track repeat sales of the same house. The monthly national index suggests average prices have fallen only 3% from a peak in April 2007, and the quarterly figures are still positive (see left-hand chart).
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In recognition of our legions of loyal readers in Budapest, Hungary, we are broadcasting live from the “Pearl of the Danube” today.  (Actually, no - we don’t quite have “legions” of Hungarian readers.  But yes, today’s newsreel was produced on the banks of the Danube where Alpha Male was offering his two cents on alpha-centricity to [...]…
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(May 10, 2008 09:38 AM, by Bryan Caplan) From Fatal Misconceptions:And why did organizations that proclaimed family planning as a human right fail to oppose increasingly coercive policies……
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Aditya RaoThere’s a reason inflation the past week rose to 7.61% despite the government trying it’s best to make sure it shouldn’t be that high.