Marginal Revolution

Forget your cares and dream about Alesund

That's in Norway and if you live there you don't even have to worry about oil prices going up; fortunately I've been paying off the mortgage rather than buying new stocks (though JPMorgan is up), so maybe I can visit.  Here are other memorable photos, albeit not of Alesund.

My podcast on macro and monetary policy

It is with Russ Roberts and it covers the roots of our current crisis, why things are far more troublesome than most people expected (and that is the really tough question; real estate bubbles have burst before), why monetary policy matters at all, the tricky balancing act played by the Fed, why a gold standard isn't the answer, and many other macroeconomic topics.  My core attitude, in case you don't already know it, is that monetary policy is both an art and a science and there are no secret ways of getting it right, understood by only a few.  The podcast is here. 

Addendum: Arnold Kling summarizes.

The Holiday-Year Challenge

Suppose you want every day to be a holiday.  To fulfill your dream you can travel around the world.  You can take up to a 3-day holiday, like Japan's 3-day New Year, but not the 12 days of Christmas.  You can also count Sunday or equivalent day of rest as a holiday.  Can it be done?  What is the longest holiday stretch possible? 

Surely you all wondered the same

Not all investors are expected to be pleased with the deal. A conference call with investors and analysts on Sunday night was broken up when a Bear Stearns shareholder sought an explanation of why he would be better off approving this transaction rather than seeing Bear Stearns file for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The JPMorgan executives demurred, instead referring the investor to Bear Stearns executives for an explanation. The shareholder declared that he would vote against the deal.

Afterward, Mr. Cavanaugh said JPMorgan felt comfortable in pulling the trigger despite the short due-diligence process. “We’ve known Bear Stearns for a long time,” Mr. Cavanaugh said.

Vis-a-vis that last sentence, last year the stock price was $170, late Friday it was $30 a share, yesterday the deal was done at about $2.  Here is the story.  From published accounts, the nature and extent of the Fed and Treasury obligations is not yet clear.

Always Low Prices

Given that the company headquarters is said to be worth about $1.2 billion, that gives the BS [Bear Stearns] banking business a value of negative $1 billion.

That's John Quiggin.  As Matt Yglesias points out, maybe the building isn't worth $1.2 billion any more but that isn't reassuring economic news either.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet

That's the new Jeff Sachs book.  It promotes resource pessimism, Nordic-style social democracy, foreign aid, and a fundamental rethinking of U.S. foreign policy.  Most of all it expresses a faith in global cooperation.  Sachs is very smart and, though I do not agree with him, there is often more to his views than his critics admit.  But my browsing of this book never gave me the feeling that I had access to the mind of Jeffrey Sachs.  It doesn't even read like a popularization.  Imagine a smart and diligent but not insightful or self-reflective person doing a "color by numbers" version of what a Jeffrey Sachs book should read like.