For the past 10 years, at the end of the year, the New York Times discusses 10 ideas for the past year. The ideas vary widely and may pertain to social trends, sports, or war. The lead-in idea for 2010 was “Do-It-Yourself Macroeconomics”.
It certainly is an honor to be mentioned along with the Big Picture and Calculated Risk. Here is a snip from the 10th Annual Year in Ideas.
For the 10th consecutive December, the magazine has chosen to look back on the past year through a distinctive prism: ideas.
Our digest of short entries refracts the light beam of human inspiration, breaking it up into its constituent colors — innovations and insights from a spectrum of fields, including economics, biology, engineering, medicine, literature, sports, music and, of course, raw-meat clothing. Happy thinking!
D.I.Y. Macroeconomics
Until recently, the economics profession largely controlled the production, dissemination and interpretation of economic data. Now there’s a new trend afoot: do-it-yourself macroeconomics, in which ordinary citizens pull apart the data and come to their own conclusions.
The democratization of economics owes much to the financial crisis that first hit in 2007. That ongoing catastrophe, which few economists predicted, tarnished the profession’s reputation, prompting some to look elsewhere for answers. They turned to — where else? — the Internet, where vast amounts of economic data that had once been hidden from public view were now online. Sites like FRED, maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, enabled anyone with a connection to the Web to download data on everything from local home-price indexes to credit-card balances to weekly fluctuations in diesel prices.
At the same time, a growing army of knowledgeable “econo-bloggers” began analyzing the data available online. Strikingly, many of the authors of these blogs — the brains behind the Big Picture, Calculated Risk, Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis and others — aren’t academic economists but people with real-world experience in financial markets. Their Web sites offer sophisticated interpretations of economic data and hold passionate debates with their readers over the merits of the data. As a result, economic data that were formerly greeted with grudging acceptance by the public — the latest unemployment figures, for example — are now the catalyst for endless popular exegeses.
Please see the article for a wide variety of other ideas.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
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Mish I am a regular follower.
I have decided to start an organization of one to begin to push back at unecesary compliance regulations that are destroying the brokerage industry.
Anti money laundering laws cost the industry millions but it has to my knowledge it has only been the major banks that have been prosecuted. In my 40+ years in the business I don’t ever recall an instance when the firms have had a problem either before or after the rules were introduced.
We do know it exists because drug cartels have to launder money and only the major banks are big enough to carry it off.
In Canada much has been made on the strength of the Canadian banks.
In fact they were on the receiving end of a bailout in 2008 ,1980, and are vulnerable today.
Our banks have been keeping zombie companies alive by rewriting and extending loans.
I referr to a blog by Alex Jurshevsky of Recovery Partners.
You can see the very few # of bankruptcies by googling Canada Superintendant of Banktuptcies.
It is counterintuitive that in these times when commodity prices are low that we should have so few bankruptcies. Canadian banks tier one capital rates are among the lowest of the major world banks.
Our banks have been issuing contingent preferred shares at a frenetic rate to shore up their capital ratios.
The recent Coservative government the Bank of Canada and the Canadian Bankers Association have denied that the banks were bailed out. Ascacresult most Canadian retirees are loaded with bank stocks. Canadian banks are included in the 10 top shorted companies in the TSX.
Brokers are held to account for the degree of risk they expose their clients to.
It becomes difficult when your governing bodies lie and cheat..
Our banks it seems are considered to be too big to fail and as such should be required to dispose of their brokerage assets.
I will be working to bring public scrutiny to these problems.