Archive for September, 2008
September 30, 2008 at 12:03 am
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September 29, 2008 at 12:03 am
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"To provide authority for the Federal Government to purchase certain types of troubled assets for the purposes of providing stability to and preventing disruption in the economy and financial system and protecting taxpayers, and for other purposes."
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This paper discusses some of the key characteristics of the U.S. subprime mortgage boom and bust, contrasts them with characteristics of emerging mortgage markets, and makes recommendations for emerging market policy makers. The crisis has raised questions in the minds of many as to the wisdom of extending mortgage lending to low and moderate income households. It is important to note, however, that prior to the growth of subprime lending in the 1990s, U.S. mortgage markets already reached low and moderate-income households without taking large risks or suffering large losses. In contrast, in most emerging markets, mortgage finance is a luxury good, restricted to upper income households. As policy makers in emerging market seek to move lenders down market, they should adopt policies that include a variety of financing methods and should allow for rental or purchase as a function of the financial capacity of the household.
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Consumerism arises when patients acquire and use medical information from sources apart from their physicians, such as the Internet and direct-to-patient advertising. Consumerism has been hailed as a means of improving quality. This need not be the result. Consumerist patients place additional demands on their doctors' time, thus imposing a negative externality on other patients. Our theoretical model has the physician treat both consumerist and ordinary patient under a binding time budget. Relative to a world in which consumerism does not exist, consumerism is never Pareto improving, and in some cases harms both consumerist and ordinary patients. Data from a large national survey of physicians shows that high levels of consumerism are associated with lower perceived quality. Three different measures of quality were employed. The analysis uses instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of consumerism. A control function approach is employed…
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The crowd. The spectacle. The pall of blue smoke and roasted clutch discs. In all motorsport, no event captures the universal human need to whale on old crapcans and hoover down greasy barbecue like the 24 Hours of LeMons. Each LeMons race is for cars purchased, fixed up, and track-prepped for a total of 500 dollars or less. But before reaching the grid, you'll have to survive trials like the Personal-Injury-Lawyer Anti-Slalom, the Marxist-Valet Parking Challenge, and the Wide Open Throttle Rodthrowapalooza. Twelve hours into the race, the car voted People’s Choice is called in and awarded a cash prize; simultaneously, the car voted People’s Curse is called in and summarily destroyed. At the end of 24 hours, a gala awards ceremony plies the survivors with trophies, plaques, and four-figure purses in canvas bags full of nickels. What's not to like?
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September 28, 2008 at 12:02 am
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Fact: Charles Tyrwhitt New York City store #1 is located at Madison Avenue & 46th Street, on the ground floor of the ex-Bear Stearns corporate headquarters Fact: Charles Tyrwhitt New York City store #2 is located at 7th Avenue & 50th Street, on the ground floor of the ex-Lehman Brothers corporate headquarters Fact: Bear Stearns is toast Fact: Lehman Brothers is even toastier Discussion: While further research is required to determine the exact linkage between Charles Tyrwhitt shirts and recent examples of the massive evaporation of shareholder value, the correlation trend is undeniable. Potential catalysts for Charles Tyrwhitt based shareholder value evaporation include bank risk officers spending their afternoons perusing between 100s of shirts in various cuff, collar, and color/stripes combinations instead of properly valuing CDO securities, an “uppity” British attitude permeating the entire building like the smell of a “5-dollar footlong” from Subway…
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Ohio History Central is an evolving, dynamic online encyclopedia that includes information about Ohio's natural history, prehistory, and history. Each section contains written information, maps, timelines, and images. Many of these pages link with one another to form a complete and informative perspective. As installments are added each year, an accurate overview of Ohio's past will be revealed. Ohio History Central is perfect for anyone wanting to learn more about Ohio! You can access information in Ohio History Central by entering one or more words in the search box at the top of any page, or you can browse the encyclopedia. Browse objects are indexed by alphabet, subject matter categories, topics, time periods, geographic locations within Ohio, and by media types. Although the encyclopedia is not yet complete, new information is added regularly. If you do not find what you are looking for this time, be sure to check back.
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September 27, 2008 at 12:02 am
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A benediction followed Barack Obama's closing speech at the Democratic convention in Denver. The audience, many already exiting, were asked to join in. Those who stayed may have been puzzled to see Pastor Joel Hunter—a conservative evangelical, registered Republican, staunch abortion opponent and one-time candidate to head the Christian Coalition of America—leading some 80,000 Democrats in prayer. Equally surprising, just before the convention, Obama and McCain met for their first public campaign appearance in a mega-church in California, for Pastor Rick Warren's "Compassion Forum." On the day Obama accepted his nomination, liberal evangelical activist Reverend Jim Wallis mused: "At this year's Democratic convention, faith has become cool."
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We present insolvency practitioners from 88 countries with an identical case of a hotel about to default on its debt, and ask them to describe in detail how debt enforcement against this hotel will proceed in their countries. We use the data on time, cost, and the likely disposition of the assets (preservation as a going concern versus piecemeal sale) to construct a measure of the efficiency of debt enforcement in each country. We identify several characteristics of debt enforcement procedures, such as the structure of appeals and availability of floating charge finance, that influence efficiency. Our measure of efficiency of debt enforcement is strongly correlated with per capita income and legal origin and predicts debt market development across countries.
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Online anonymous corruption reporting software.
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Mainland regulators have told domestic banks to stop lending to United States financial institutions in the interbank market in a bid to prevent possible losses during the financial crisis, industry sources said yesterday. The ban from the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) applied to interbank lending of all currencies to US banks but not to banks from other countries, a source said. The CBRC was not available for comment yesterday. The decree appears to be Beijing's first attempt to erect defences against the deepening US financial meltdown after the mainland's major lenders reported billions of US dollars in exposure to the credit crisis. Lending transactions on the mainland interbank market totalled 10.65 trillion yuan (HK$12.17 trillion) last year, according to the People's Bank of China. In the first eight months of this year, transactions totalled 10.11 trillion yuan, up 104 per cent from a year earlier. At the end of last year, the mainland interbank market had 717…
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September 26, 2008 at 12:02 am
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The televised presidential debates have played a key role in many of the US election campaigns since the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon contest. Here are some of the dramatic moments which changed the course of election history.
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The Iraq War is a testament to the great damage a foreign policy based on myths, lies and distortions can do to our nation's security and well-being. As the election draws near, a new set of myths and fallacies as misleading as those that led the Senate to support George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq have become embedded in our foreign policy discourse. Many of them are being perpetuated by the very same political forces that peddled the myth of mushroom clouds coming from Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Others are the product of muddled thinking on the part of both Republicans and Democrats. If left unchallenged, these myths and fallacies could influence the outcome of the election and shape policy in the next administration. In this special feature, put together by Nation editors with Sherle Schwenninger, a frequent Nation contributor and director of the Global Economic Policy Program at the New America Foundation, we dissect ten of them…
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The San Diego Union-Tribune just became the latest newspaper to shutter its D.C. office. The recent spate of bureau closings strikes a major blow for comprehensive political coverage, but it is also a warning about newspaper survival.
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Every year during the second and third quarters (the “hot season”), regional housing markets in the U.K. and the U.S. experience systematic above-trend increases in both prices and the volume of transactions. During the fourth and first quarters (the “cold season”), housing prices and the volume of transactions fall below trend. A similar seasonal cycle is observed in other developed countries. We present a search-and-matching model that can mimic the seasonal fluctuations in transactions and prices in both the U.K. and the U.S. The model features “thick-market” effects that can generate substantial differences in the number of transactions and prices across seasons, with the extent of seasonality in prices (transactions) depending positively (negatively) on the “market power” of sellers. As a byproduct, the model sheds new light on the mechanisms governing fluctuations in housing markets and can be adapted to study lower-frequency movements in prices and transactions.
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When America was being divvied up, surveyors and cartographers were as accurate as possible drawing the boundaries between these new regions. Unfortunately, mistakes were still made. And minor map mistakes led to years of fighting—sometimes in the courts, and sometimes on the field of battle.
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September 25, 2008 at 12:02 am
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A hundred years later, it is still one of the most controversial games played in American professional sports — and still the only major league game ever decided by an umpire alone in his hotel room, hours after the last pitch was thrown. It set off one of the worst displays of sportsmanship ever seen in New York City. Most amazing of all, it allowed the Chicago Cubs to win the World Series, the last time they have done so. Think Chuck Knoblauch meets Steve Bartman, and you will have some idea of the immensity of Fred Merkle’s blunder.
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September 24, 2008 at 12:01 am
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Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are bailed out by the Fed; Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy; AIG is on the brink of ruin; and the Dow Jones drops 500 points in one day. With the still-unfolding turmoil in the financial markets on September 16, Wharton students packed a one-thousand-seat auditorium to hear Wharton Professors Jeremy Siegel, Richard Herring, Franklin Allen, and Joseph Gyourko take on the issues. MBA students Jennifer Akpapuna and William Hodge, co-presidents of Wharton Graduate Association's Finance Club, helped moderate the discussion.
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Volumes of research show that people in different geographic regions differ psychologically. Most of that work converges on the conclusion that there are geographic differences in personality and values, but little attention has been paid to developing an integrative account of how those differences emerge, persist, and become expressed at the geographic level. Drawing from research in psychology and other social sciences, we present a theoretical account of the mechanisms through which geographic variation in psychological characteristics emerge and persist within regions, and we propose a model for conceptualizing the processes through which such characteristics become expressed in geographic social indicators.
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September 23, 2008 at 12:01 am
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Welcome to PublicMarkup.org, an ongoing experiment in preparing legislation more inclusively by opening bills to online, public review. PublicMarkup.org gives you the opportunity to review and comment on proposed bills before they are even introduced—or while they are pending—in Congress.
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On a $500 million man-made island in the frozen Arctic Ocean, just off the coast of a vast, uninhabitable tundra known as Alaska’s North Slope, a pipeline begins. In temperatures that hover around forty-five degrees below zero, in perpetual darkness, a tight-knit band of roughnecks spends twelve hours a day, seven days a week, drilling down, down into the earth and pulling up precious crude. If you want to know how badly we need oil, here is your answer
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With a drastic intervention in the economy and hundreds of millions of dollars to buy up bad debt, the US government is attempting to prevent further bank failures. But the risk of a meltdown of the financial markets, with drastic consequences for the global economy, has not yet been averted.
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Geographers and social scientists find it increasingly difficult to intervene in debates about vital matters of public interest, such as the Iraq war, because of the ideological polarization and lack of respect for empirical analysis that have afflicted US politics in recent years. In this commentary we attempt to intervene in a way that applies some fairly objective and unobtrusive measures to a particularly contentious issue: the question of whether or not the so-called `surge' of US military personnel into Baghdad - 30 000 more troops added in the first half of 2007 - has turned the tide against political and social instability in Iraq and laid the groundwork for rebuilding an Iraqi polity following the US invasion of March 2003.
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September 22, 2008 at 12:01 am
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September 20, 2008 at 12:00 am
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