Washington Square Capital Management Blog

The Journal’s E. S. Browning has an interesting piece contrasting the views of Robert Shiller and Jeremy Siegel, with some added commentary from Ben Inker at GMO.

John Dizard writes in the FT about the reforms needed in the securitisations market.

A lot of ink has been spilled recently on the weakness of a currency union without a federal political system (i.e. the Euro).  The most interesting background article we’ve seen on this topic is Stratfor’s Germany’s Choice which takes the long view and is well worth a read.

Simply put, Europe faces a financial meltdown.

The crisis is rooted in Europe’s greatest success: the Maastricht Treaty and the monetary union the treaty spawned epitomized by the euro. Everyone participating in the euro won by merging their currencies. Germany received full, direct and currency-risk-free access to the markets of all its euro partners. In the years since, Germany’s brutal efficiency has permitted its exports to increase steadily both as a share of total European consumption and as a share of European exports to the wider world. Conversely, the eurozone’s smaller and/or poorer members gained access to Germany’s low interest rates and high credit rating.

And the last bit is what spawned the current problem.

Bloomberg is running a report on pending amendments to the BLS labor statistics which may result in sharply higher unemployment statistics in 2008/2009.  The reasoning is that the BLS model’s mechanism to account for newly-created and recently-closed businesses does not consider the sharply higher number of closures over that time period.  More recent data will not be revised till next February.  The article is well worth a read.