Worried about bank failures? First step: check if your bank is insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). If so, then your first $100K is insured against loss so no worries.

Got more than $100K? Well then, you'd better speak with EDIE.
posted on Jul 14, 2008 - View this thread

The simple phrase "it's different this time" are the four most expensive words in the English language. Sir John Templeton, 1912-2008, we thank you for this lesson and countless others.
posted on Jul 9, 2008 - View this thread

The simple phrase "it's different this time" are the four most expensive words in the English language. Sir John Templeton, 1912-2008, we thank you for this lesson and countless others.
posted on Jul 9, 2008 - View this thread

While the wild crowd call it "Woodstock for Central Bankers", others get festivities off on a sour note, referring to it as "Understanding Inflation and the Implications for Monetary Policy". Regardless of what your invitation to this party reads, it starts today, Monday June 9th on the 50th anniversary of The Phillips Curve, a previously discredited forecasting tool which may be revived by Ben Bernanke at The Federal Reserve.
posted on Jun 9, 2008 - View this thread

While western banking institutions continue to reel from the credit crunch, Islamic banking, with assets approaching one trillion dollars, is growing at roughly 20% pa by offering Sharia compliant - and only Sharia compliant - financial products. But compliance to Sharia law in matters financial is not easy (previously).
posted on Jun 6, 2008 - View this thread

While western banking institutions continue to reel from the credit crunch, Islamic banking, with assets approaching one trillion dollars, is growing at roughly 20% pa by offering Sharia compliant - and only Sharia compliant - financial products. But compliance to Sharia law in matters financial is not easy (previously).
posted on Jun 6, 2008 - View this thread

Underlying several hundred thousand Student Loans, millions of Adjustable Rate Mortgages and trillions of dollars worth of financial derivatives is the London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR. Launched in 1986 by the British Bankers' Association (BBA), LIBOR is the most widely used benchmark of short term interest rates.

And with the recent credit market difficulties still fresh in the minds and impacting the balance sheets of many market participants, the way LIBOR is calculated - and the interest rates charged - may be changing.
posted on May 30, 2008 - View this thread

The rapid growth of electronic trading since 1976 has benefited equity market participants by improving competition, reducing cost and increasing liquidity while insuring better pricing.

One unexpected side effect has been the recent emergence of "dark pools of liquidity", or the secret stock market.
posted on May 20, 2008 - View this thread

The Promise of Prediction Markets (full text link; .pdf here). A group of distinguished economists and other scholars has published a call to exempt prediction markets (previously on MeFi: 1, 2) from American laws that restrict internet gambling.
posted on May 16, 2008 - View this thread

Academic discussions of stock markets frequently reference The Efficient Markets Hypothesis; an idea that share prices are fairly valued, their prices reflecting all available information. However folklore such as "Sell in May and go away", which proved prudent in 2007, clashes with this theory.
posted on May 15, 2008 - View this thread

The year was 1978. The US Dollar was collapsing, inflation was beginning to surge, the American economy was on the brink of recession and many warned of the perils of easy money. Needless to say, Arthur Burns, 10th Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, had a tough job.
posted on May 8, 2008 - View this thread

Oil's got one. So does cocaine. There used to be one for light bulbs and another for uranium. While we know one currently exists for diamonds, some folks think the music industry has one.
posted on May 5, 2008 - View this thread

Although Larry Summers drew fire for rather inappropriate comments illustrating differences between Men and Women, we all know they exist.
posted on Apr 9, 2008 - View this thread

Inflation in Zimbabwe recently reached 160,000%. Get in on the ground floor now by purchasing a $50,000,000 bill (currently selling for 20,000x its value). Dare to become a millionaire!
posted on Apr 7, 2008 - View this thread

Credit Suisse will take a $2.65 billion hit to earnings and post it's first quarterly loss since 2003 due, to no small part, to deliberate mispricing of asset backed securities by several traders operating at all levels of seniority across the 143 year old institution.
posted on Mar 21, 2008 - View this thread

The Next Bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow's big crash. A layman's primer on the genesis and future of today's economic troubles, at Harper's Magazine.
posted on Mar 13, 2008 - View this thread

While the US equities markets were closed on Monday for Martin Luther King Day, stock markets around the world took a nosedive, losing billions in equity; the markets in Australia, South Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Germany, France, the UK, and more countries have dropped at least 5% each (Canada only fell 4.75%), even though most of those markets had already been seriously down for several days prior. India has been hit particularly hard, at one point down a whopping 11%, tripping their markets' automatic "circuit breakers" for a mandatory time-out period, before scraping back up to close at 8% down. US futures markets are currently predicting a 650+ point drop just at the open Tuesday morning, before even a single trade goes through.
posted on Jan 22, 2008 - View this thread

It was twenty years ago today...
posted on Oct 19, 2007 - View this thread

What's the link between:
1) the quickly-growing number of American homeowners becoming unable to pay their mortgages after their ARM's reset (a trend nicknamed "ARMageddon" -- applicable in the UK too), which is translating into soaring foreclosure rates, and in turn forcing at least 60 US semi-shady mortgage brokers to go belly-up in the past year (i.e. the "subprime meltdown"), and...
2) the recent implosion and impending financial bailout -- which may become the biggest since the Long Term Capital Management fiasco of 1998 -- of two Bear Stearns hedge funds which dealt in mortgage securities? [more inside]
posted on Jul 11, 2007 - View this thread

Engadget briefly cost Apple $4 billion today when they posted a fake email about the iPhone being delayed, causing Apple's stock to plunge. While competing gadget blog Gizmodo avoids gloating, there is evidence that some investors made a lot of money from the mistake. Are we seeing the early days of sophisticated stock hacking on the web, as has (incorrectly) been alleged before? Certainly the old pump-and-dump methods are no longer working like they did.
posted on May 16, 2007 - View this thread

"The great thing about the market is that it has nothing to do with the actual stocks." Jim Cramer--probably most famous for his CNBC show "Mad Money"--comes clean in a TheStreet.com interview about the tactics he used while managing his hedge fund and how he, you know, might influence Apple's stock if he were in the game today. Feathers get ruffled.
posted on Mar 21, 2007 - View this thread

The Motley Fool's new CAPS stock-picking system keeps track of your stock picks and whether they outperformed or underperformed the market. Then everyone's picks are aggregated, weighted by the quality of their past records, to rank individual stocks. Here's how it works. (more inside)
posted on Oct 4, 2006 - View this thread

"Buy Stock in Ipods. Or Da Vinci Codes." Steve Odom's Smarkets is a web-based stock trading game (and market experiment) based on Amazon.com sales rank. (via jayisgames)
posted on Dec 22, 2005 - View this thread

Consensus View
New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds "explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future." Now this idea has been put into practice with Consensus View, a site where you can enter your predictions on stocks, commodities, and currencies, and view the group consensus. (from wsj.com)
posted on Sep 18, 2005 - View this thread

Marketocracy is a free, handy site where you can practice building your own stock portfolio.
MOFQX is a moderately successful mutual fund driven entirely by the top 100 performers out of some 37,000 Marketocracy members. With market-beating returns and an innovative method, some think that the fund might be a great idea--perhaps the wisdom of crowds made manifest--but others are less bullish.
posted on Jul 26, 2005 - View this thread

The Watchful Investor "Bringing you the underreported, the underappreciated, and the overlooked news from the markets."
Jim Waddell created this frequently updated journal providing economic news and commentary, as well as a newsletter which gives more detailed coverage of specific market events and issues. Accessible and interesting, yet not dumbed down.
posted on Jul 18, 2005 - View this thread

The Last Days of NYC's Fulton Fish Market. A lovely, Mitchell-like paean to the odiferous old fish market that, like the rest of Manhattan, is being sanitized. Here's another, not quite as well done. Here's a great page of old articles and info. Don't like word pictures? Flikr has some really nice galleries. Forgotten New York has a tour of the area around the market. Or maybe you just want today's prices.
posted on Jul 14, 2005 - View this thread

Economic 'Armageddon' predicted by Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley. He's been right before.
posted on Nov 23, 2004 - View this thread

What the (Internet) Bubble Got Right Paul Graham has written a thought-provoking essay on the positive lessons we should have taken away from the Internet bubble of the late 90s.
posted on Sep 29, 2004 - View this thread

More Election Predictions. Not based on ideological politics, but on the way they speak, or perhaps on the way the economy moves, on top of futures markets. Are we moving toward Electorometrics?
posted on May 6, 2004 - View this thread

Thoughts on organizations, markets and the long term. CSFB gathers a number of luminaries in academia and business (Bonabeau, Bingham, DePodesta, Enriquez, Harrington, McGahan, Schrag, Strogatz) to discuss informational diversity, viewing markets as complex adaptive systems, global climate change over millenia, and the imapact of genome science among other ideas.
via JoHo
posted on Jan 22, 2004 - View this thread

The Ideosphere, a prediction market like the one the Pentagon wanted to set up, predicts a 20% chance of the non-test use of a nuclear device on U.S. soil by 2010. Other predictions include the likelihood of various candidates winning the next Presidential election, as well as the number of troops killed in Iraq and the chance of a human clone by 2005.
posted on Nov 6, 2003 - View this thread

Ranking Emerging Markets by "Market Potential" Michigan State Univ ranks emerging markets by their market potential. Does this mean that all new investment should go to Hong Kong and Singapore? Anyone willing to sink major $ in country #6- Hungary?
posted on Oct 24, 2003 - View this thread

DIVE! DIVE! DIVE! - Markets in free fall. Remember the heady DotCom bubble days, and innocuous scandals - Clinton & Monica,the cigar?! Then, WHAM: 9-11, Enron, Worldcom et. al, the push for invasion of Iraq, ballooning deficits, while a new US neocolonial American ideology of preemption suggests more invasions to come - with a worldwide surge in anti-American attitudes. "Irrational Exuberance" turned to terror, fear, worry, anger, rage. What possible train of events and U.S. government policies could more efficiently send world economic markets into free fall? Hold on: it was a two decade long ride up - the ride down has merely begun. Those among us with a few spare billion lying around will wait until the bottom, and buy on the cheap. For everyone else, it's bankruptcy, frugality, middle class decline, cans 'o beans and darned socks. But cheer up: play, joy, creativity, generosity, indeed love itself - and also the classic "recreation of the poor" are all free.
posted on Mar 7, 2003 - View this thread

The New Gilded Age and its Discontents. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz began explaining why markets fail long before Enron and WorldCom rose, exploded and crashed. But not many people wanted to listen during the boom-boom '90s; Stiglitz was even fired from his position as chief economist at the World Bank after he repeatedly criticized the organization's free-market obsessions.
posted on Jul 3, 2002 - View this thread

Crime in the Suites. William Greider claims that the Enron collapse demonstrates the failure of market orthodoxy.
posted on Jan 22, 2002 - View this thread

The problem isn't too much greed, but too much cowardly greed. "Spineless lenders, weak-kneed investors and meddling regulators intent on reducing risk pose a greater threat to the global economy than the volatile financial markets... 'The critic's image of the global financial markets as a giant casino is wrong," [writes British financial writer Daniel Ben-Ami], 'On the contrary, the modern financial markets are more often characterized by a fear of risk-taking than a reckless disregard for danger.'"
posted on Aug 2, 2001 - View this thread

All Good No Bad Singapore is a country where markets are perfect and it is known globally as the economic miracle. A country where politics, intellectual life and criticism is sacrificed on the altar of the market. A nightmare, should I say?
(Link courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily)
posted on Feb 24, 2001 - View this thread

California shuts down Nader-Gore vote trading site. This is absolutely ridiculous. "William Wood, chief counsel for the office of the secretary of state, said yesterday morning that trading for anything valuable is illegal. "
posted on Oct 31, 2000 - View this thread

Gore pulls even with Bush in the Iowa Electronic Markets.
posted on Sep 1, 2000 - View this thread