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What Happens During Delevering
- Risk spreads, liquidity spreads, volatility, term premiums – they all go up.
- Delevering slows/stops when assets have been liquidated and/or sufficient capital has been raised to produce an equilibrium.
- The raising of sufficient capital now depends on the entrance of new balance sheets. Absent that, prices of almost all assets will go down.
“My intuition is that they are too early. In an ordinary cycle, this should be the time to start thinking about buying. This isn’t an ordinary cycle.”
—Michael Steinhardt, who returned an average 24 percent a year for almost three decades when he ran his New York-based hedge fund Steinhardt Management Co., said forecasts for an earnings rebound are a false hope.
Most people seem able to provide cogent-sounding reasons for voting the way they do. However, careful observation suggests that these reasons are often merely rationalizations constructed from readily available campaign rhetoric to justify preferences formed on other grounds.
The resulting appearance of “issue voting” was almost wholly illusory
— Bartels
If history is a guide, an Obama victory in November would lead to faster economic growth with less inequality, while a McCain victory would lead to slower economic growth with more inequality.
On a new book by Larry M. Bartels, a professor of political science at Princeton: “Unequal Democracy”
“We still have a third-world grid. With the federal government not investing, not setting good regulatory mechanisms, and basically taking a back seat on everything except drilling and fossil fuels, the grid has not been modernized, especially for wind energy.
The United States looked like the biggest emerging market of all.
Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers. This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.
They’re certainly not making ‘Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.’
— Peter Guber, the chief executive of Mandalay Entertainment Group and the former head of Columbia and Sony Pictures
The relationship between e-mail activity and hierarchical level is striking; the average executive (members of the top four salary bands) in our sample sent and received more than twice as many e-mails as the average middle manager who, in turn, sent and received more than twice as many as the average rank-and-file employee. Likewise, executives communicated with many more partners than middle managers or rank-and-file employees and their e-mails were substantially more dispersed across business unit, function, and office boundaries.
—HBS Paper on Communication & Coordination
And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast -Man’s laws, not God’s- and if you cut them down -and you’re just the man to do it- do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? …Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
—A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt
Representative John Dingell says tightening fuel efficiency rules unfairly penalizes domestic carmakers and rewards foreign rivals that make small cars.
“The American auto industry has sold the cars people wanted. You’re going to blame the auto industry for that or the American consumer? He likes it sitting in his driveway, he likes it big, he likes it safe.” –John Dingell
And when the exceptionally low price of oil suddenly shifts, as it has now, those manufacturers whose market is predicated on that exception find their products no longer appealing and their business seemingly no longer viable.
Stilltitled 