Submitted by Businomics Blog
Here’s a good interview on CNBC with Austan Goolsbee, Senator Obama’s chief economic advisor. I don’t buy his proposals, but he explains them fairly well here.
Warning: what a political candidate’s economist says is not likely to be what the elected official does. Anyone remember Nixon’s wage and price controls, […]

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Submitted by Businomics Blog
Merrill Lynch and Citigroup are looking for new capital from international investors, primarily government investment funds. The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) that foreign governments have already invested $27 billion in Merrill, Citi, UBS and Morgan Stanley.
Although the hand-wringers will worry, this is good news for the economy. The […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM
The IMF forecasts world GDP growth of close to 5% for 2008, continuing a five-year trend of above average growth for the world economy. In a post yesterday, I suggested that continuing, strong economic growth in the developing economies and emerging markets (the IMF forecasts 10% growth in China for 2008, 8.4% […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM

The chart above (click to enlarge) shows annual world real GDP growth from 1980 to 2008 (IMF estimates growth of 4.8% for 2008), using data from the IMF, along with shaded areas of years during which the U.S. economy was in a recession. During the last four U.S. recessions (1980, 1982, 1990-91, […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM

From two-wheelers (above) to four-wheelers (below)!

Nano, Tata Motors’ Rs. 100,000 (US$2500)”people’s car” (pictured above) was unveiled at the Auto Expo 2008 in New Delhi today.
“This is a proud moment for India. It demonstrates India’s technological and entrepreneurial ability,” Commerce Minister Kamal Nath told reporters on Thursday. “It fulfils the need of […]

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Submitted by Econbrowser
With recession calls becoming more frequent ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5]) it might pay to revisit the indicators that the NBER looks at in determining the turning points in recessions (The fact that NBER put up some new recession-dating-FAQs just a couple days ago might be a leading indicator of sorts).

Figure 1: Posts […]

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Submitted by Businomics Blog
Barry Ritholtz over at The Big Picture has a good insight into the new guy at Bear Stearns. Last summer he anticipated a change in senior management and said this:

“Just wait until Jimmy Cayne gets dinged out of Bear Stearns. The new CEO will look at all the junk on the […]

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Submitted by A Dash of Insight
As usual, Barry Ritholtz has been setting the table with a number of interesting questions. We shall try to catch up.
Today he points out a forecast he made months ago about a possible transition at Bear. Here is the key argument:

I thought it was worth sharing. Over the […]

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