Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal opinion page editors published an opinion entitled "The Keynesian Dead End," arguing that world leaders were finally seeing the folly of the idea that government "stimulus" is required to prop up economic growth, and predicting: "We suspect that Mr. Obama will find a stonewall in Toronto when he pleads with...
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Double dip ahead?
Lately, there's been a lot of chatter in the financial media about the prospects for a "double dip" recession -- the idea that the economic recovery that began in the first quarter of 2009 was just a short interruption in a larger catastrophe and that in the months ahead or in 2011 we will plunge back down into an abyss as deep or deeper than the...
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Let's make it even harder to obtain oil in the US
Yesterday, a US federal judge struck down a six-month moratorium on all drilling for oil at depths greater than 500 feet (and industry participants note that drilling permits in shallower waters were being delayed as well). While it is nice to see the rule of law being upheld against government restrictions of legal business activity, the fact is...
Monday, June 14, 2010
The price of protectionism
We've written before about the often-unappreciated costs that result from government attempts to "protect" an industry or sector from competition of one form or another.Now, in the wake of the Gulf oil spill disaster, comes a shocking example of the horrendous costs that protecting some favored group, regardless of consequences, can have.According...
Thursday, June 10, 2010
News flash! Computer model enables you to beat Wall Street!
Technology Review, a publication of MIT, published an article today with the headline, "AI that picks stocks better than the pros."The story describes a computer program designed by college computer science professors which analyzes the text in news articles found in Yahoo! Finance about various stocks and then buys them or shorts them based on the...
Monday, June 07, 2010
Bubble alert!
Hat tip to Professor Mark J. Perry and his always-fascinating Carpe Diem blog, where today he points out a dangerous bubble that has yet to burst -- the "higher-education college-tuition bubble."Professor Perry's chart shows that the price of the average college tuition has increased by over ten-fold since 1978 -- far outstripping the price increases...
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Exaflood update
Back in December, we published a post containing a link to some of the excellent analysis Richard McManus has been publishing at ReadWriteWeb on the exponential growth of data taking place all around us, often unnoticed and taken for granted.Recently, he published a post entitled "The Coming Data Explosion" discussing some very interesting statistics,...
