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

• Randall Forsyth (Barron’s): Synchronicity and stock prices, November 3, 2009. In a post-bubble world, equities move in sync with the cycle - worrying given the loss of momentum. As albert Edwards concludes, “the trend is your friend until it hits a bend. Beware, we may have just hit one.”

• Judy Chen (Bloomberg): Stiglitz says US is paying for failure to nationalize banks, November 2, 2009. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said the world’s biggest economy is suffering because of the US government’s failure to nationalize banks during the financial crisis. “If we had done the right thing, we would be able to have more influence over the banks,” Stiglitz told reporters. “They would be lending and

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A reader left a link to a long article from the Boston Globe about what a modern depression would look like. My first observation was that it reads a lot like Michael Panzner's book that I was probably the last person to read two years ago. Amusingly it seemed less bleak than when I read most of the same stuff in Panzner's book two years ago because things have deteriorated so much since then. Foreclosures and unemployment are way up and the stock market and GDP are way down. Given that we are much closer to a depression in terms of what is actually happening on the ground it's like there is less ground between here and the scenario spelled out in the article and because of that it seemed less scary. I'm sure there is some ...

 

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Bad Bets: Illiquid ETFs

Ian Salisbury of Dow Jones Newswires is one of the best fund reporters in the business. In his latest piece appearing

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A couple of great questions came in on the Seeking Alpha version of this morning's post about run-of-the-mill bear markets and I thought it would be useful to post the questions here and how I answered them.Why do you think we won't have a decline similar to what we had in '00-'03, which was a lot more than 30%?Markets cut in half every so often; the great depression, the mid 1970's; the start of this decade and I also know there was a depression in the 1870's but do not know what the market did then, there was also a bank panic in 1907 that lead to a 37% decline that year. If you notice you see the gaps in time ranging from 22 years on up.I believe the reason for this is that the market "can't" cut in half so soon after doing ...