Category Archive

These events usually begin when the executives gather in the Oval Office, where they experience certain Enhanced Negotiating Techniques.
—David Brooks on Public / Private negotiations

The Treasury is issuing a lot of money. The market is beginning to wonder who is going to be buying these bonds.
—Bill Gross

A social network is a network of meanings

A story is at root an authority, a transfer of identity, which explains its close correspondence to network tie.

—Harrison White, Identity and Control (1992), observing that social network ties emerge from stories, “stories describe ties in social networks,” and “stories are essential vehicles for elaborating networks so as to become the base for further formations.”

Society is not merely an aggregate of individuals; it is the sum of the relations in which these individuals stand to one another.
—Marx (1857)

The national economy is showing some initial signs of stability, confidence is improved, the financial system is starting to heal, credit is starting to ease a bit. It’s just the beginning, however. We have a lot more work to do to lay the foundation for a sustainable recovery with the gains broadly shared among all Americans.
—Tim Geithner

I am 100 percent sure that the U.S. will go into hyperinflation. The problem with government debt growing so much is that when the time will come and the Fed should increase interest rates, they will be very reluctant to do so and so inflation will start to accelerate….Of all the regions in the world, Asia is still the most attractive by far.
—Marc Faber

There are some concerns of a risk from inflation from all the liquidity injected into the banking system but it’s not an immediate threat right now given all the excess capacity in the U.S. economy. I have a little more confidence that the Fed has an exit strategy for draining all the liquidity at the appropriate time.
—David Cohen, head of Asian economic forecasting at Action Economics in Singapore

The US didn’t pass international copyright protection until 1891. Until then, anything that sold elsewhere could be sold in the US without restriction. If it was a bestseller in Britain, we brought it over. The presses were smoking and ready to go.

1790 – The US passes its first national copyright law. It provides fourteen year coverage for authors who were citizens or residents of the US.

1831 – The US extends copyright to 28 years but refuses to make international considerations

1842 – Dickens toured the US pleading for copyright protection

1843 – A Christmas Carol was selling for six cents in the US and $2.50 in England

1850 – Among Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the US still refused to recognize international copyright, contrary those acts already instituted by Denmark, Prussia, England, France, and Belgium.

1891 – Congress passed an international copyright act and gained reciprocal rights from the British. The typesetters had made a fortune harvesting the productive capacity of British authors, and the act would no doubt affect their copyright arbitrage model. Congress made sure to support them through the transition. The Copyright Act of 1891 protected only those foreign works that were typeset in the US.

An increase in affordability has seemingly enticed potential homebuyers. We believe home sales have stabilized.
—Michelle Meyer, an economist at Barlays Capital

April NAR Data
—Purchases increased 2.9%, annual rate of 4.68mm, from 4.55mm in March, but they were 3.5% below the 4.85mm level in April 2008
—Existing-home sales in the Northeast grew 11.6% to an annual pace of 770,000 in April, which is 10.5% below April 2008. The median price was $237,400, 9.6% lower than a year ago.
—Total housing inventory rose 8.8% to 3.97 million existing homes available for sale, a 10.2.-month supply, compared with a 9.6-month supply in March.

Most of the sales are taking place in lower price ranges and activity is beginning to pick up in the midprice ranges, but high-end home sales remain sluggish. The Federal Reserve needs to help restore liquidity for the jumbo mortgage market by buying these loans under the TALF program.

Fortunately, home buyers are being attracted to deeply discounted prices and are bidding up many foreclosed listings, particularly in California, Nevada, and Florida – this will set the stage for healthy market conditions going forward.

The gain in inventory is largely seasonal from sellers entering the spring market. Even with the rise, inventory over the past few months has remained consistently lower in comparison with a year earlier

—Lawrence Yun, Chief Economist, NAR

There have been some encouraging signs in recent weeks that suggest perhaps the worst is behind us. Consumer confidence has ticked up. Housing turnover, especially in certain markets, is showing signs of a bottom.
—Robert Niblock, Lowe’s Chief Executive Officer, conference call May 18.

Information has three main properties that would seem to cause difficulties for market transactions.

Experience good. You must experience an information good before you know what it is. Response: previewing and browsing; reviews; reputation.

Returns to scale. Information typically has a high fixed cost of production but a low marginal cost of reproduction. Competitive markets tend to push price to marginal cost, which, in the case of information goods, is close to zero. But this leaves no margin to recover those huge fixed costs. How is it that information can be sold at all? The obvious answer is that information is rarely traded on competitive markets. Instead, information goods are highly differentiated.

Public goods. Information goods are typically non-rival and sometimes nonexcludable. Information goods are inherently nonrival, due to the tiny cost of reproduction. However, whether they are excludable or not depends on the legal regime.

The profitability of papers in the late 20th century, when they had a monopoly of classified advertising, was an anomaly. Before that, newspaper barons owned them more to wield power than nurture democracy, while the 18th-century press was as partisan and rambunctious as any bunch of bloggers.

Nor are all papers equally threatened. Business papers, including the FT, have had more success in charging online readers than general-interest publications. Many publishers regret their rush to give everything away on the web but the over-supply of general news makes it hard to backtrack.

When people really want or need something, they will pay for it, one way or another. If today’s publishers cannot convince their readers to do so, they will be overtaken by others that can.

—FT

You have to have some kind of compensation for the use of content that amounts to journalism, or otherwise you’re not going to have journalism
—Bruce Sanford, a media lawyer in Washington with Baker Hostetle