Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

Readings: Debt, Energy, Scrip, Slump, Transitions, Dipshits, Lithium, etc.

pk — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:37:11 PDT

Hagen: U.S. addicted to energy/debt (Source)
Scrip as private money, monetary monopoly, and the rent-seeking state in Britain (Source)
Skidelsky: Future generations will curse us for cutting in a slump (Source)
Critical Transitions in Markets and Macroeconomic Systems at Macroeconomic Resilience (Source)
Lead Investors, Dipshit Companies, and Funding Every Entrepreneur (Source)
Is America the Next Lithium Powerhouse? (Source)

An Aging World

pk — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:21:53 PDT

From GE, a nifty visualization of our aging societies around the world. (Note that the applet is slightly larger than the space available here, so go to the GE site if you want to see it with all controls working properly.)

The whole thing is big, so … after the jump.

Readings: Cars, Morality, Food, CPK, etc.

pk — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:16:42 PDT

Entry Level Car Segment Stumbles (Source)
The new science of morality (Source)
Phytoplankton in retreat (Source)
Will California Pizza Kitchen Deliver for Private Equity? (Source)

[T] Facebook as Cattle Chute

pk — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:17:32 PDT

I’m inordinately fond of this quip of mine from earlier today:

Facebook is an information cattle chute: All curves and distractions on the way to getting a bolt in brain.

Readings: China, VC Performance, CRE, Housing, Startups, etc.

pk — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:04:46 PDT

The PBoC can’t easily raise interest rates (Source)
Latest VC performance data: negative 1- and 10-year returns, slightly ahead of public markets on 5-year (Source)
UTIMCO data has USV leading 5/10-year vintage VC performance sweepstakes, with 2004 fund’s 48% IRR (Source)
Parcel near Chicago’s Grant Park auctioned for less than half its debt (Source)
High unemployment and the education deficit (Source)
PeerIndex: Morningstar for people (Source)
HIGH FINANCIER by Niall Ferguson, reviewed by Tim Congdon (Source)
Is the Canadian Housing Market Overvalued? A Post-Crisis Assessment (Source)
Working at a startup sucks (Source)
What Do You Lack? Probably Vitamin D (Source)

Canadians Tag off U.S. on Whole Real Estate Thing

pk — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:36:31 PDT

Awfully kind of Canada to tag off the U.S. and carry on with the whole real estate bubble thing without us. Such nice and helpful people. And polite too.

Some Venture Capital Mythbusting

pk — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:28:57 PDT

I gave a talk last week wherein I tried to bust a few venture capital myths. Here are some samples:

Kleiner Perkins is among top ten venture capital firms.
Serial persistence of long-term performance
Rise of super-angels is mostly about declining cost of company creation
Having 5-year returns 100 basis points ahead of public markets makes venture compelling

John Turturro on Playing “Jesus” in The Big Lebowski

pk — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:14:31 PDT

If you’re a fan of The Big Lebowski (and we fans of the Dude can spot each other at 1,000 yards), you’ll enjoy this segment of John Turturro talking about the creative process behind him developing his classic “Jesus” character.

And the original “Jesus” scene is after the jump.

Malcolm Gladwell on Success

pk — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:56:41 PDT

Good (and funny) discussion between Malcolm Gladwell and Robert Krulwich on success.

[via Radiolab]

[T] Niall Ferguson (2003) vs Niall Ferguson (2010)

pk — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:34:56 PDT

Matt Yglesias puts together a Niall Ferguson vs Niall Ferguson debate, then and now. The 2003 Ferguson is in boldface, and the 2010 Ferguson is in italics:

Guns or butter: this is the choice historians conventionally say that governments face. The administration is currently engaged in an audacious — some would say reckless — experiment to disprove this theory. To judge by his actions, the President’s response to the question “Guns or butter?” is: “Thanks, I’ll take both.” This, in short, is the guns and butter presidency.

Are there precedents for such a combination? What’s to say this deficit-spending won’t work? Keynes would tell us that in the current environment we must boost aggregate demand.

Certainly. Long before Keynes was even born, weak governments in countries from Argentina to Venezuela used to experiment with large peace-time deficits to see if there were ways of avoiding hard choices. The experiments invariably ended in one of two ways. Either the foreign lenders got fleeced through default, or the domestic lenders got fleeced through inflation.

But the United States has broken the guns or butter rule before. Under President Ronald Reagan, substantial increases in military spending coincided with comparable increases, relative to gross domestic product, in personal consumption — that proportion of G.D.P. that the public, as opposed to the government, spends. The crucial point, of course, is that in the short term at least, fiscal policy is not a zero-sum game.

More here.

iPhone Now, and Then and Then and Then

pk — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:37:10 PDT

Four generations of iPhone compared:

Four Generations of the iPhone from Chris Pinnock on Vimeo.

Readings: Hospices, Japan, Debt, Mosquitoes, Faber, etc.

pk — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:33:07 PDT

Paul Romer on charter cities, academic entrepreneurs, etc. (Source)
Apartment rentals surge in U.S. on foreclosures (Source)
Hospice medical care for dying patients (Source)
For Edwards, the Japanese lesson still holds… (Source)
The Muni-Bond Debt Bomb (Source)
A war against mosquitoes? (Source)
Marc Faber: Relax, This Will Hurt A Lot (Source)
G.M. puts $41,000 price tag on Volt (Source)

Montier: Austerity as the Road to Ruin

pk — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:06:28 PDT

I’ll confess that these austerity/stimulus arguments are mostly on-beyond-boring for me, but James Montier is such a muscular writer that this is worth a look:

GMO Montier 26Jul [via Zero Hedge]

Fetters of Gold and Paper: How Fixed Exchange Rates Can Kill You

pk — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:51:26 PDT

New paper from Barry Eichengreen on that Barbarella relic, or was that barbarous?

Fetters of Gold and Paper

We describe in this essay why the gold standard and the euro are extreme forms of fixed exchange rates, and how these policies had their most potent effects in the worst peaceful economic periods in modern times. While we are lucky to have avoided another catastrophe like the Great Depression in 2008-9, mainly by virtue of policy makers' aggressive use of monetary and fiscal stimuli, the world economy still is experiencing many difficulties. As in the Great Depression, this second round of problems stems from the prevalence of fixed exchange rates. Fixed exchange rates facilitate business and communication in good times but intensify problems when times are bad. [Emphasis mine]

Beautiful Data: Martin Wattenberg on Data Visualization

pk — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:45:13 PDT

Good presentation from data visualization guy Martin Wattenberg talking at MIT about data/text visualization.