Controversy-hounding econometricians

So Barry Ritholtz has also noticed the rising trend of economists who embarrass their profession via “provocative” “studies” which fly in the face of real world experience.
Much of investing relates to mathematics and the application of statistics. Markets are statistical data generating machines, and that data can be sliced and diced in a myriad of [...]

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The fission of the global debt market

The widening of the Ted spread appears to have instigated, or at least preceded once again, exponentially more chaos in the European and Asian debt markets.
In Europe, the “Latin European” economies — Spain, France, Italy and Greece (coincidentally, the losers of the current euro arrangement) have seen tiny sovereign debt spreads over German bonds widen [...]

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EUR-JPY strikes again!

It took a lot longer yesterday, but the markets ultimately obeyed the direction of EUR-JPY.
Especially gold. (wow.)
And the dollar didn’t even weaken, except relative to the yen (and everything else weakened vs. the yen.)
Dollar sentiment has been so glum for so long that you’d expect a rally to happen, but when you game out the [...]

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To poo is glorious

Deng Xiaoping inaugurated China’s “kai fang gai ge” (era of openness and reform) with the slogan, “To be rich is glorious.” Although he has not lived to see the day, I am sure he is smiling somewhere:
In one of the most extreme signs of China’s modern grasp of entrepreneurial possibilities, gold panners are striking deals [...]

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