Marco Arment comments smartly on this NYT story describing the arrangement among stores like H&M and Wal-Mart and their suppliers, whereby the suppliers give stores credit for unsold products and instruct stores to destroy the items instead of sending them back:
It’s unfair to criticize these two companies for a practice that’s incredibly common in the entire industry, spanning nearly every product category and nearly every major retailer.
The wastefulness of this is disgusting, but I’m not sure who’s really at fault, if anyone.…
In American political discourse, it is permitted to speak about race, sex, gender, and religion. Class, however, is the one category about which we are not permitted to speak, or, increasingly, to think. Witness the speed with which any policy proposal with potentially egalitarian consequences is labeled “class warfare” in the press; if this epithet is becoming less common, that’s likely only because the category itself is less and less familiar in the public mind. And why admit the existence…
Mike at Rortybomb captures the essence of the mark-to-market/mark-to-model debate nicely:
At this point, I almost expected him to say “the problem is that all we can see is the shadow of the assets projected on a wall, not the real Form of a bond comprised of $500k loans to junkies. If only we could see the outside the limited cognition of our cave, see these mortgage-backed securities in the light of the actual Sun….”
Want to know how I know your markets are…
The casualties of the financial crisis aren’t just institutions, homeowners, and the newly unemployed: some ideas have taken a beating as well. John Quiggin (Queensland) collects some of his work on refuted economic doctrines, and they’re really well executed (both the articles and the ideas, if you’ll pardon the pun):
#1 The efficient markets hypothesis
#2 The case for privatisation
#3 The Great Moderation
#4 Individual retirement accounts
#5 Trickle down
For those with ears to hear and eyes to see, some of those ideas have…
INT. CLASSROOM.
CAPITALISTS are assertive, industrious, and creative teenagers, trying to make up in earnestness what they lack in wisdom and good judgment. As the scene opens, Capitalists are pacing the room, clearly panicked.
Capitalists: Oh, s#@t, this is not good. This is not good.
UNITED STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT peeks its head in the doorway. United States Federal Government is best described as bipolar, alternating as it does between a personality that strives to protect its citizens from dangers both foreign and domestic,…
Thursday, January 7, 2010
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