Jay Currie

Remember the inclined plane. Roll the ball bearing (or the marble) and the physics, the laws, of motion are revealed. d=a*t and all that. And once you adjust for error and make a couple of assumptions, voilà, the experiment conforms to the prediction.

Certainly it gets hairy out in quantum land or where there is entanglement [...]

Ian Welsh and I disagree about a lot of things but he is still one of the most astute big picture analysts I have run into on the web. He has an interesting take on the hype and the reality of the current fiscal/debt/bailout/bank/deflation crisis over at FireDogLake. Well worth reading.

Targeted actions would have fixed [...]

So familiar is this pattern—described by the economic historian Charles Kindleberger—that it is possible to distill it into five stages:

(1) Displacement: Some change in economic circumstances creates new and profitable opportunities. (2) Euphoria, or overtrading: A feedback process sets in whereby expectation of rising profits leads to rapid growth in asset prices. (3) Mania, or [...]

I have written a couple of posts about Canada as Switzerland (no, not the possibly soon to default new Switzerland, the old 1970’s hard currency Switzerland). But, right at the moment, we don’t want to be Switzerland and our loonie is falling out of bed.

We don’t want to be Switzerland because their banks were lending [...]

Paulson’s dreadful scheme will become law, because Americans love their bankers. The bankers enable their collective gambling habit. Think of America as a town with one casino, in which the only economic activity is gambling. Most people lose, but the casino keeps lending them more money to play. Eventually, of course, the casino must go [...]

Okay, Ike turned out to be a mess…quite a big mess; but not the economy wrecking, gas price goosing, hurricane from Hell which it was looking like on Friday. Houston is a mess but the refineries should be online in a matter of five to ten days.

So we can turn our attention back to the [...]