Per Karlberg

bits and pieces

Historical p/e

Average price/earnings ratio of Standard & Poors composite index (red line is historical average).

Read full article at: econbrowser.com > lost_decade_for stocks

Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai or goodbye

"It’s a pretty good bet that a city with an average temperature of 90 degrees and an indoor ski slope is probably living a little too large. [...]

For the last couple of years, the running joke on Wall Street was “Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai or goodbye.” If you were the C.E.O. of a troubled investment bank desperately looking for cash, you made a pilgrimage to one of those three cities with hat in hand. They were the places most likely to write a quick billion-dollar check; their eagerness should have also been a tip-off. Now you have to wonder about Mumbai and Shanghai, too. Are they next in line to take a fall?"

NYT - Financial mirage in the desert

Kina uppsida och nedsida

Newsweek - Everything You Know About China Is Wrong

"Beijing has been feted for uniquely steady helmsmanship in financial storms. So perhaps it's natural for forecasters to assume that the Chinese supertanker of state is not turning sharply now, particularly since it continues to grow rapidly even as other economies sink in the recession. Yet this crisis is different—bigger and more damaging than any seen in generations—and it is exposing limits and forcing change in just about every key piece of the China model: the supremacy of the one-party state, the smart economic management, the export-driven growth, the emerging consumer class, the burgeoning private sector, the headlong focus on growth at any environmental cost, and the drive to build world-class companies."

Det går att ana skadeglädje och formuleringarna är inte alltid så objektiva, men det är ändå intressant att höra, i många fall, pålästa personer uttala de reservationer som finns mot the China way.

NYT - Beijing’s Air Is Cleaner, but Far From Clean

"Roughly four million vehicles clog Beijing roads, seven times the number about 15 years ago. On any given day, another 1,500 new vehicles join the crush. So it is no surprise that Beijing has some of the worst air pollution of any big city on earth.
No, the surprise is this: Beijing’s air is actually getting cleaner. China may have a hard-earned reputation for long-neglected and fearsome environmental problems, from poisoned rivers to chemical-belching smelters. But the nation’s capital, Beijing, is trying hard to clean up its dirty air."


picture courtesy of NYTimes.com.
Kanske motsatsen till den andra artikeln. Kul att höra lite positivt om miljöarbetet i Peking.

Hur king är cash?

Paypals utvecklingschef Osama Bedier snackade på Future of the Web Apps idag om pengar och betalning, något som tyvärr är väldigt aktuellt idag i Sverige. Att pengar och rikedom är knuten till sedlar och mynt (som kan bli stulna och gömda) och inte knutna till personer och företag känns både märkligt och otidsenligt.

Paypal öppnade för en tid sen upp sitt API och lanserade nyligen en kampanj kring frågan “How will you change the way we pay?” med #changehowwepay och changehowwepay.com. Paypal sammanfattar utgångspunkten i den här videon:
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Det har pratats om den potentiella kopplingen mellan bankliknande system och sociala nätverk ett tag (ex artikeln nedan) och med en aktör som Paypal med öppet API är det inte lika långt in i framtiden.

The Social Networking revolution is just getting started. Theres so much more to come.
The Social Networking revolution is just getting started. There’s so much more to come
theNextWeb

Social networks are the new banks
Thanks for the dinner, how much do I owe you? Many transactions are being done within a group of friends. In the future we will be wiring money via our mobile phone to one another. Doesn’t it make sense to be able to send cash (and I mean real cash and not some sort of virtual currency) using our network. You don’t have to know a bank account number, you only have to be friends on a network (or send it to a username within the same social network). This is a very interesting revenue stream for social networks. First of all, people have to deposit money to the networks bank accounts and they can pool that money and get interest revenues and they can charge you per transaction (say 5 cents per transaction).
Dessutom startade MIT Media Laboratory tillsammans med Bank of America the Center for Future Banking förra året för att kolla på frågor som: "How will social networks and mobile platforms transform customers' banking experiences, making it easier, more convenient, and better integrated with their daily lives?"

Nu är frågan lite mindre het efter finanskris, Gov 2.0 och hype kring Cloud Computing (som i för sig är lite relaterat eftersom båda handlar om att bygga säkra distribuerade system) men...

Krugman analyserar NEK i allmänhet och vad som ledde fram till krisen

How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
nyt.com

"Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. [...] (T)he central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess."

"The elegance and apparent usefulness of the new theory led to a string of Nobel prizes for its creators [...]. Armed with their new models and formidable math skills — the more arcane uses of CAPM require physicist-level computations — mild-mannered business-school professors could and did become Wall Street rocket scientists, earning Wall Street paychecks."

"(T)here was something else going on: a general belief that bubbles just don’t happen. What’s striking, when you reread Greenspan’s assurances, is that they weren’t based on evidence — they were based on the a priori assertion that there simply can’t be a bubble in housing.[...] In short, the belief in efficient financial markets blinded many if not most economists to the emergence of the biggest financial bubble in history. And efficient-market theory also played a significant role in inflating that bubble in the first place."

"If [economics] is to redeem itself, it will have to reconcile itself to a less alluring vision — that of a market economy that has many virtues but that is also shot through with flaws and frictions. [...] What’s probably going to happen now is that flaws-and-frictions economics will move from the periphery of economic analysis to its center."

“'The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.' As pointed out, arbitrageurs — the people who are supposed to buy low and sell high — need capital to do their jobs. And a severe plunge in asset prices, even if it makes no sense in terms of fundamentals, tends to deplete that capital. As a result, the smart money is forced out of the market, and prices may go into a downward spiral."

"The vision that emerges as the profession rethinks its foundations may not be all that clear; it certainly won’t be neat; but we can hope that it will have the virtue of being at least partly right."

 

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