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Daily Archives: November 16, 2008

Charlie Rose with Bill Ackman

Charlie Rose's interview with Bill Ackman, hedge fund manager of Pershing Square Capital Management LP.  As usual, some really good stuff.

Cochrane: Time to buy stocks?

John Cochrane says stock is cheap at least as measured by dividend/price ratio, but you need to have the appetite for further downfall in the short term (source: wsj):

[Commentary]

Cochrane may well be right, but judging by historical P/E ratio, it may be still too early to call the bottom.

chart via Mike Panzner

Financial Engineering vs. Real Engineering, Again

An update on my previous post on financial engineering vs. real engineering. Here is an interesting chart from MIT’s Andrew Lo. We are likely to see a sharp convergence of the two lines (esp. the post grads) in coming years.

Paulson: We stabilized financial system

Henry Paulson interview on CNBC:

"I think the system has been stabilized.  I don't think people are going to bed at night wondering which major financial institution might have a problem."

Krugman says depression economics returns

Krugman writes on NY Times — His central message: this ain't normal time, so extraordinary measures are needed:

To see what I’m talking about, consider the implications of the latest piece of terrible economic news: Thursday’s report on new claims for unemployment insurance, which have now passed the half-million mark. Bad as this report was, viewed in isolation it might not seem catastrophic. After all, it was in the same ballpark as numbers reached during the 2001 recession and the 1990-1991 recession, both of which ended up being relatively mild by historical standards (although in each case it took a long time before the job market recovered).

But on both of these earlier occasions the standard policy response to a weak economy — a cut in the federal funds rate, the interest rate most directly affected by Fed policy — was still available. Today, it isn’t: the effective federal funds rate (as opposed to the official target, which for technical reasons has become meaningless) has averaged less than 0.3 percent in recent days. Basically, there’s nothing left to cut.

What does all this say about economic policy in the near future? The Obama administration will almost certainly take office in the face of an economy looking even worse than it does now. Indeed, Goldman Sachs predicts that the unemployment rate, currently at 6.5 percent, will reach 8.5 percent by the end of next year.

All indications are that the new administration will offer a major stimulus package. My own back-of-the-envelope calculations say that the package should be huge, on the order of $600 billion.

So the question becomes, will the Obama people dare to propose something on that scale?

Let’s hope that the answer to that question is yes, that the new administration will indeed be that daring. For we’re now in a situation where it would be very dangerous to give in to conventional notions of prudence.