Category: Web/Tech
I want my Felix Salmon
Employees said they were told Thursday that most of Portfolio’s Web
site staff would be dismissed and that much of the content unique to
the site would be dropped.
Please keep him, we need him (and Zubin too). I hold out hope in that word "most." Here is the story. Media, like new library books, are being hurt by the downturn and the slowing of advertising dollars. I fear that the non-independent blogosphere may be in for a bit of a financial bloodbath. So often the bloggers were an "investment in long-term name and image" rather than a profit center.
Update: So far, so good. Felix lives!
Assorted links
1. The new Princeton University Press blog
2. Here is a good paper on how structured finance went wrong.
3. Robert J. Samuelson, The Great Inflation and its Aftermath. It’s remarkable that no other major book to date has covered this critically important topic.
Econ bloggers gain clout in financial crisis
Here is the article, there is lots from me and from Mark Thoma, among others.
On a more casual note, I’ve enjoyed blogging the same topic week after week after week. I wonder at what point I will feel like cracking?
Assorted links
1. What consumers do in a downturn: surging vs. dwelling
2. CIA coups and insider trading
3. When do people root for the underdog?
4. Maybe asking people to vote doesn’t increase turnout (via Kottke)
Assorted links
1. Yale course on game theory, on-line
2. New blog on Austrian economics
3. Stunning pictures of slime mold
Assorted links
1. Jeff Hummel blames Bernanke and Paulson for what has happened. I don’t agree but we are committed to passing along many different points of view.
2. My favorite Greg Mankiw column so far.
3. Dividends vs. share repurchases: an excellent post.
4. New blog on cognition and culture, via Razib.
Is there a credit crunch?
Here is a good piece rebutting the Minneapolis Fed study. One point made is this:
…there is the inconvenient matter that the Federal Reserve and
the Treasury went out and did all that stuff they did in order to prevent a
massive breakdown in lending to the real economy. … Now this does
allow sceptics to say, "Well, how do we know things would have collapsed"? We
don’t, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that current lending takes
into account massive government intervention to make sure that lending
continued. The latter therefore can’t be used to argue that the former wasn’t
necessary.
On these questions I am more of a pessimist than is Alex.
Assorted links
2. Life under extreme scarcity
4. I enjoyed this sentence: "Lady, I know I’m in jeans and you’re all throwing that scarf around over your suit, but two years of blogging has left me pretty confident that my thought is rigorous."
Brokers with Hands on Their Faces
From The Brokers With Hands on Their Faces blog. Where else?
Hat tip to Boing Boing.
Assorted links
1. Price Fishback on New Deal mortgage aid
2. Using the placebo effect for health care policy
3. Finger-tapping speed peaks at age 39 for men
4. Markets in everything: betting on Turing machines
James Surowiecki has a blog!
Find it here. One of my favorite moments of the London trip was when Alex, in a luncheon full of highly intelligent British people, referred to "the wisdom of crowds." There was a brief moment of silence. Then one such Brit cleared his throat and corrected him to the notion of "wisdom *for* crowds"…
Assorted links
1. Why Scottish independence might never happen: the bailout for the Royal Bank of Scotland
2. Why Canada has largely avoided a financial crisis
3. The scariest hour on Wall Street
Assorted links
The Singularity is Near
Telepathy has always been a sign of kookiness but synthetic telepathy heh that’s just around the corner.
The U.S. Army is developing a technology known as synthetic telepathy that would
allow someone to create email or voice mail and send it by thought alone. The
concept is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an
electroencephalograph, or EEG…The idea of communicating by thought alone is not a new
one. In the 1960s, a researcher strapped an EEG to his head and, with some
training, could stop and start his brain’s alpha waves to compose Morse code
messages.
Here is a previous post in the series.
Top ten blogs to read during the banking crisis
Here is a list from The Times of London. I would add Felix Salmon, Paul Krugman, Arnold Kling, calculatedrisk, Dealbreaker, Brad DeLong, Naked Capitalist, and others.
I thank Mark Brady for the pointer.