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

• Doug Kass (TheStreet.com): Bearish arguments are roaring, September 14, 2009. In summary, the market has discounted favorable expectations (certainly against forecasts four months ago!) and seems more “certain” of a self-sustaining recovery cycle outcome. Reflecting the gravity and weight of so many inhibiting factors, I see a much broader range of possible outcomes and less certainty than some of the newly printed bullish market participants. The credit expansion of the last several decades has reversed, it will take time to reverse the damage to net worth and confidence, the consumer remains in a fragile state, corporations will make do with more productive but fewer personnel (job growth could continue to disappoint), there are no apparent drivers to replace the role of

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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 of interest.

• Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O’Rourke: A tale of two depressions, June 4, 2009. This is an update of the authors’ 6 April 2009 column comparing today’s global crisis to the Great Depression. World industrial production, trade, and stock markets are diving faster now than during 1929-30. Fortunately, the policy response to date is much better. The update shows that trade and stock markets have shown some improvement without reversing the overall conclusion - today’s crisis is at least as bad as the Great Depression.

• Martin Wolf (Financial Times): Reform of regulation has to start by altering incentives, June 24, 2009. Bubbles and crises cannot be eliminated from capitalism. Yet it is hard to believe

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

• Tom Lauricella (The Wall Street Journal): Is this bull cyclical or secular?, June 15, 2009. Many investors are now calling the rebound in stocks since early March the start of a new bull market. But it could be only a temporary respite from a longer-term bear market dating back to the beginning of this decade.

• Andy Xie (Caijing.com.cn): Tight spot for Fed, blind spot for investors, June 8, 2009. If you are a speculator and confident you can get out before it crashes, this is your market. If you think this market is for real, you are making a mistake and should get out as soon as possible. If you lost money during your last three market

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One of the oldest tricks in the authoritarian playbook is the subtle theft of the people's sovereignty, grafting the rights of citizens onto a regime of personal power. Cuba's Fidel Castro was and is the grandmaster of this tactic - firmly uniting himself, his name, his family, and his Revolution, and the country.  If you go against Fidel, this means you are going against the Revolution and against the national interests.  It's all inseparable, you see?  There's no shortage of contemporary examples, ranging from the rhetorical artistry of Hugo Chavez to the skillful disaggregation of African opposition by Robert Mugabe.

It's the same in Russia.  Whenever someone criticizes Vladimir Putin, the party, the siloviki, or government policy, this individual is instantly cast as a deranged "anti-Russian" whose hate

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I personally don't subscribe to the idea that Washington holds Latin America in the same regard as Moscow does the former states of the Soviet Union.  Certainly, throughout history there has been no shortage of unfortunate if not brutal examples of the United States treating the region as its backyard.  In the post-Cold War years, we had the Clinton administrations playing around in Haiti and pushing, with a bit too much enthusiasm, orthodox economic policies.  In the Bush years, Latin America discovered that being completely ignored by Washington wasn't always much better than engagement.Though it may yet be proven strictly rhetorical, President Barack Obama's approach feels like a sea change in the American attitude toward Latin America.  The willingness to atone for past ...

Yesterday Bob blogged about disaggregating Russia by focusing on high ranking stakeholders in the Kremlin rather than broad sanctions which would punish average citizens. Today, Gideon Rachman (who back in April predicted the war) mentions the visa issue as well in the Financial Times. Doesn't anybody remember how kind Russia was with visas for British citizens for the Champion's League match? Ah, it seems that an invasion and occupation can very quickly erase such small gestures of goodwill. The Russian government’s reluctance to occupy Tbilisi shows that there is still a debate going on in Moscow about how much international opprobrium the country can afford. Half a trillion dollars was wiped off the value of the Moscow stock exchange in the aftermath of the invasion of Georgia. The wealthy, Kremlin-connected elite would like to retain the privilege of having bank accounts in Switzerland, houses ...