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): Reflation trade shifting into reverse? October 27, 2009. Risk assets ranging from stocks to commodities to currencies seem to be faltering after being floated on a sea of liquidity.

• Doug Kass (TheStreet.com):   My “fast money” recap, October 28, 2009. I saw some emerging technical signs of market weakness that could override seasonal strength, including three failed rallies in the past week, a contracting number of new highs on the New York Stock Exchange, a breakdown in the Dow Jones Transportation Average and, generally, stocks have begun to sell off on good and bad news. … asked how vulnerable the market was over the short to intermediate term if I used the quantitative models that

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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.

• John Hussman (Hussman Funds): We’re speaking Japanese without knowing it, September 28, 2009. After the bubble burst in Japan in 1990, Japanese banks were not compelled to properly disclose their losses either. The predictable result is that the problems resurfaced later, but worse, because they had not been addressed.

• John Authers (Financial Times): A risky revival, September 25, 2009. The speed of the rally is itself cause for concern. Historically, big sell-offs have typically been followed by big bounces. But as measured by the S&P 500, the current rally is stronger after six months than any predecessor, including those that followed the lowest points of the market in 1932, 1974 and 1982.

• Tom Petruno (Los Angeles

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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.

• John Hussman (Hussman Funds): Profiting from the tooth fairy, August 3, 2009. It is a general investment rule that by the time that a particular thesis makes it to the cover of national news magazines, it is largely discounted by the markets. Momentum-based, trend-following, simplistic thinkers with a speculative bent generally do very well during bubble periods (though not over the full cycle). Such analysts are often able to do what we can’t bring ourselves to do, which is to risk other people’s financial security on raw price momentum, or on speculative themes that are contradicted by historical data, or that logically cannot be true.

• Edmund Conway (Telegraph): Economic crisis, and a crisis for economics, July 29, 2009.

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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.

• Michael Milken & Jonathan Simons (The Wall Street Journal): Illness as economic metaphor, June 20, 2009. Our economic doctors should permit America’s uniquely effective immune system to take over as companies and financial institutions deleverage their balance sheets. With people and with capitalism, the tincture of time is often the best medicine.

• Christina Romer (The Economist): The lessons of 1937, June 18, 2009. As someone who has written somewhat critically of the short-sightedness of policymakers in the late 1930s, I feel new humility. I can see that the pressures they were under were probably enormous. Policymakers today need to learn from their experiences and respond to the same pressures constructively, without derailing the recovery before it

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The New Republic has a rather acerbic but interesting interview with Charles Fairbanks, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former deputy assistant secretary in the Department of State. We completely agree with him that the Bush administration's Iran obsession is really allowing the Russians to completely distort the balance of power in the relationship. How would you characterize the U.S. response to the crisis? Could the administration be doing more? This is a huge event. It really alters the international landscape, and the backgrounders that came out of the State Department talk as though it's just another little outbreak of instability in the third world. There's no realization that this is an event like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The real test of the Bush administration's policy will come in the next months--whether there is any fundamental adjustment to totally new realities in our relationship with ...