In Mammon Among Friends, Malcolm C. Harris, Sr. provides commentary and news about the national economy, the Wichita economy, the world of finance, and utility & postal economics. Experiences such as a utility commission staff manager, forecasting postal volumes and revenues, consulting on utility regulation, and teaching corporate finance have shaped his analysis.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Is Alan the Culprit?
Those of us with the more mundane worry of whether the crisis will translate into a recession will be reassured The Wall Street Journal already has the remedy: use fiscal policy not monetary policy. The paper's editors believe the dollar's virtue can not take any more ease. Read its editorial, "False Savior."
The Subprime Mortgage Credit Crisis & the Bursting of the Housing Bubble Drops Mortgage Mail Solicitations By 62%
Prominent mortgage brokers and mortgage banks have gone bust while major players have with drawn from the market.
DM News reports that the Treasury facilitated plan to selectively freeze the rates on some ARMs is causing direct marketing pros to adjust their offers.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Electronic Payments Now Outnumber Checks by 2-1!
Check usage by 6.4 percent a year from 2003 (the last year studied) to 2007.
Economic Terms and Concepts
The Present Value of a future cash flow discounted at X% is the amount of money you would need to invest today earning interest compounded annually at X% to accumulate that future amount. It answers the question "How much do I have to invest now to end up with that future sum if I earn the discount rate?"
A security's Current Yield is its annual income divided by its current price. For a bond it is the coupon interest divided by the price. For a share of common stock, it is the annualized dividend divided by the price.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
If the Goliath Has the Distributors In His Pocket, It's Time For David's Sling
The Dreamliner Is Back On Target!
The Subprime Mortgage Crisis, Recession, and Citibank
Alan Greenspan dissects "The Roots of the Mortgage Crisis." He thinks that if it had not been subprime mortgages, then something else would have precipitated a crisis after risk premia had fallen so low.
Also on the Opinion Page, Alan Reynolds analyzes the dollar in his commentary, "Interest Rates and Dollar Fundamentals" and Martin Feldstein advises on "How to Avert Recession."
Meanwhile, Citicorp, parent of Citibank, has decided that Vikram Pandit and Sir Win Bischoff should stay on as CEO and Chairman, respectively. They were both acting in those jobs. You can read about it in Robin Sidel and David Enrich's article. The big question remains: "Can a universal retail/wholesale bank be created like a hothouse plant through mega mergers and acquisitions?" I have my doubts. That certainly not the way the House of Morgan was created. On October 16th, Ms Sidel and Jeffrey McCracken reported increased skepticism that Citi's universal banking strategy was working.