There were some other very interesting presentations at the conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston last week. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke spoke on Financial Regulation and Supervision after the Crisis while Princeton Professor Alan Blinder's message was

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Gerard Lyons (Times Online): Discovering if we learnt the lessons of Black Monday, October 19, 2009. Today (Monday) is the twenty-second anniversary of Black Monday. On this day in 1987 stock markets around the world crashed. The Dow Jones fell 22.6 per cent in one day, London shed one fifth of its value over two days. The newspapers and television were full of pictures of traders in panic. Sound familiar? Reflecting on 1987 is interesting in its own right and has lessons for today.

• Allan Dodds Frank (The Daily Beast): Hedge fund dominoes, October 18, 2009. Friday’s insider-trading charges against the founder of Galleon could be the tip of the iceberg. Other hedge funds and the McKinsey consulting

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In which I join the ongoing debate on how much we should expect fiscal and monetary stimulus to accomplish.

Arnold Kling has proposed a "recalculation" theory of macroeconomics:

My claim (which is not original with me-- it is recognizably Austrian) is that a recession can be thought of as a recalculation. Imagine a central planner who decides to radically change plans. He has a huge recalculation to make in order to figure out where to allocate labor and capital. He says to some people, "Wait a minute. I am thinking. Some of you just have to stand idle while I figure this out."

The market economy is like that central planner. We are undergoing a Great Recalculation....

In conventional, hydraulic macro, we think in terms of this one good called GDP, and the output gap is the difference between how much of this GDP stuff we could produce if everybody were working and

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This post provides links to a number of thought-provoking articles I have read over the past few days that you may also find interesting.

•John Hussman (Hussman Funds): Showtime for visible roots and fruit, September 8, 2009. In my view, the next 12-16 weeks will be extremely important in shedding light on any incipient economic recovery. Investors have become so used to the idea that stocks often foreshadow economic strength that actual, convincing evidence has been dispensable - beyond the excitement over “less bad” economic news. The next 12-16 weeks will change that.

• Alan Blinder (The New York Times): The wait for financial reform, September 5, 2009. Back during the Obama transition, the newly designated chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, enunciated what I’ll call the Emanuel Principle: “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste,” he said. “It’s an

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This post provides links to a number of thought-provoking articles I have read over the past few days that you may also find interesting.

• John Hussman (Hussman Funds): Biting a bullet, July 27, 2009. In my view, investors have left themselves far too little room for error, not only in stocks, but also in corporate bonds. We’ll take our evidence as it comes, and change our positions as the expected return-to-risk profile of the market changes. For now, we remain defensive.

• Alan Blinder (The Wall Street Journal): The economy has hit bottom, July 23, 2009. How’s the economy, you ask? I have the proverbial good news and bad news, but in this case, they’re exactly the same: The US economy appears to be hitting bottom.

• Wolfgang Münchau (Financial Times): There is no easy way out for central

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Despite rising Treasury Note yields, US stock markets yesterday closed at their highest level for 2009. Also, commodities were driven higher by reports indicating that the recession is abating, but the US dollar retreated on concerns of the huge issuance of government bonds.

Elsewhere, Chrysler completed its deal with Fiat, the US Treasury Department announced that ten banks would repay TARP funds, and the Obama administration is dropping its plan to cap salaries at firms receiving bailout funds and has backed away from a large-scale reduction in the number of agencies overseeing financial markets.

Coverage of these events on camera this week included discussions with John Hussman, Chris Whalen, Peter Peterson, Paul Krugman, Mohamed El-Erian, Laszlo Birinyi, Jim Rogers, Jim Grant and Francisco Blanch.

The selection kicks off with the highly regarded John Hussman sharing his wisdom and concludes with an interesting snippet on Africa as an investment destination.

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As to be expected, discussions about the stress tests on the health of the 19 biggest US banks dominated the video airwaves during the past few days, with arguments ranging from whether the tests were necessary to whether they were stressful enough.

For the rest, Warren Buffett held his annual Berkshire shareholders’ jamboree - this year sharing both concern and optimism about the future. And as the nascent stock market rally is looking more tired by the day, the debate intensified on whether this was a “real rally”.

In addition to Buffett and the usual suspects of Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke, commentators featured on camera in this post include Richard Bernstein, Bill Fleckenstein, Nouriel Roubini, Neel Kashkari, Alan Blinder, Russell Napier, Robin Griffiths and Meb Faber.

The selection kicks off with an item in lighter vein - a song entitled

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Back in December, with the U.S. recession in its 12th month – and showing no signs of abating – Money Morning Contributing Editor Martin Hutchinson warned that an “L”-shaped recession was very possible.

The U.S. recession is now in its 15th month, and many economists now expect the downturn to last until 2010 – if not longer. In fact, some economists now say the U.S. malaise could easily evolve into the virulent “L-shaped” downturn that Hutchinson predicted – a development that would guarantee both the maximum pain and the slowest recovery, experts say.

“I said in December that the recession could be ‘bloody-L shaped.’ With the huge deficits, that now looks the most likely outcome – and believe me when I say that it will be very bloody,” Hutchinson said this week. “The economy will bottom quite soon, but every time it tries to

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Ideas we've been presenting since blog inception i.e. the Pooring of America - are starting to gain fame in the mainstream media. Again, gas dropping 50 cents is not going to fix the consumers problem. I don't care what the consumer stocks rally is "telling us" - that's just hedge funds running in and out of stocks to create a return so they can make their quarter. You have a nation built on 25 years of easier and easier credit, and that credit is drying up by the day. Then in the past decade as the middle class loses its buying power and wages do not keep up with inflation it only exaggerated the problem. To stay afloat and or "live the American lifestyle" many resorted to pulling every lever they have. Now the bill will be coming due. I ...

Regular readers of “A Dash” know that it is a blog about a book. The audience for the book is the intelligent individual investor, perhaps unhappy with his or her current financial advisor. There is always a market for this, since there will always be some financial advisors who are trailing the market in their performance.

The ads from the online brokerages will cite this evidence and appeal to the intelligent investor. Encouraged by advertisements in print media and on television, the investor decides that he can do better. He already reads business columns and watches some business programs. He is conversant with the major financial issues of the day. He probably reads some of the major slick magazines.