Monday's Instahoglets
By Fester:
As we run more 'Hoglets, I'll be very curious to see what my colleagues are reading and flagging as 'interesting but not something I can generate a post riffing off of...'
Chris Briem is concerned about Municipal Bond Defeasence:
let's just look at the issue at hand of setting aside cash to pay off debt in the future. I'ts an odd odd debate for a lot of reasons. There is nothing at all strange about paying down municipal debt. The defeasement of municipal debt happens all the time and is a well understood process. The process involves creating an escrow fund, typically buying government bonds in an amount that will pay off future payments due on extant bonds and voila, you have effectively paid down debt even though the original bonds are still out there making payments to bondholders....
given the uber-low interest rates bonds are bearing today, it could possibly be up to a ratio of 2:1. Overly simplistically, but that would mean for every dollar in cash invested now, the city could only defease 50 cents of bond debt. That does not sound good.
Matthew Yglesias has a couple of great charts on income distribution and economic mobility in the United States:
The United States, by contrast, is becoming more-and-more of a class-bound society in which parental SES dominates other factors in determining economic opportunities, helping to reinscribe patterns of inequality over and over again.
Felix Salmon has more on Ecuadorian debt recovery prospects.....
Brad Setser looks at the financial impact on Sovereign Wealth Funds --- they got creamed this year as they were looking for high yields instead of traditional reserve class assets and lower yields.
ChicagoBoyz is hosting a Clauswitz forum in January and February. I'll be participating and re-reading Clauswitz for the first time in a decade.
Thoreau reteaches some physics and makes me think about the alternative educational pathway I could have taken about a decade ago to go into academia instead of policy as their is a great deal of attractiveness of angrily and enjoyably yelling at other smart people over really greasy food and a couple of beers....
Arms Control Wonk goes off on some more physics stuff --- mainly how missile launch warning satellites see things... really cool and a bit geeky....
Here's one, Fester. Shoes weren't the only thing thrown at bush in baghdad. While he was spouting about the remarkable turnaround there, someone launched rockets at the Green Zone. Utterly unreported by Western media.
Posted by: Steve Hynd | December 15, 2008 at 04:43 PM