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Five for the Weekend #65

 Nov 06, 2009 09:52 PM UTC
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Graphic_arrow1 Via CONTROLLED GREED.com:  

Big business news today is US unemployment crossing the 10% threshold. Yet the true unemployment rate (the way the US Government used to calculate it) has been above the mid-teens for a while now. Now let's dig beneath the usual headlines for five items you might check out over the next couple of days.


  • Dale Jackson writes in the Globe and Mail about the growing attraction of dividends in the current investing climate: The dividend picture is just as bright on a global level, says David
    Tiley of Vancouver-based Cundill Investment Research. "In addition to
    no longer seeing cuts of dividends, we're seeing dividends being
    reinstated and even increased," he says.



  • Years ago I read Jim Grant point out the "democratization of credit and the socialization of risk." I'm reminded of that phrase when reading Charlie Gasparino's blockbuster op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on three decades of subsidized risk: All of which brings me back to Mr. Fortsmann's comment about policy
    makers helping turn a cold into cancer. What if the Fed hadn't eased
    Wall Street's pain in the late 1980s, and again after the 1994
    bond-market collapse? What if policy makers in 1998 had allowed the
    markets to feel the consequences of risk—allowing LTCM to fail, and
    letting Lehman Brothers and possibly Merrill Lynch die as well? There would have been pain—lots of it—for Wall Street and even for
    Main Street, but a lot less than what we're experiencing today. Wall
    Street would have learned a valuable lesson: There are consequences to
    risk.




  • In The Spectator, Martin Vander Weyer has a nice article where he reflects on time spent in Hong Kong in the past. And offers some advice for younger people: "If I was 25 years younger I’d be back out here by Christmas, hunting
    for a job or a business opportunity or a book or a column to write. If
    you’re one of those ‘recession generation’ graduates whom Matthew Lynn
    wrote about recently, or a thirtysomething whose City career has
    imploded, take my advice: just get on the plane and go, you’ll never
    regret it."



  • John Dizard latest column in the Financial Times speculates that shale gas numbers may not add up: The leading shale sceptic analyst is an independent geologist, Art
    Berman, often described as a “radical”. Rather soft spoken, though, he
    says: “I hope I’m wrong about shale.” The problem, as he sees it, is
    that the standard industry analysis about shale well Estimated Ultimate
    Recovery, or lifetime production, is too optimistic. “They have
    fantastic initial rates, but the question is whether the (rate of
    production) persists as they say.” For example, he says, in deep shale
    formations “the rock collapses as gas is produced, and crushes the
    proppant. And as the fractures are drained you have to frac and frac
    and frac.” Expensive.



  • British historian Lisa Jardine has won the Cundill History Prize for her book, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory,which is about the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, when
    a group of parliamentarians led by Dutch stadtholder William II of
    Orange-Nassau overthrew King James II. And now I've added yet another book to my lengthy "to read" list.


Have a great weekend.

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