Prieur’s readings

By Prieur du Plessis, on May 14th, 2009 posted in: Investment, Markets, Money

This post provides links to some thought-provoking articles I have read over the past few days that you may also find of interest.

• Mohamed El-Erian (PIMCO – Secular Outlook): A new normal, May 2009.

• Martin Feldstein (The Wall Street Journal): Tax increases could kill the recovery, May 14, 2009.
The cap-and-trade levy would hit low-income earners especially hard.

• The Economist: Crouching tigers, May 13, 2009.
Asian economies are likely to be the first to pull out of the global recession.

• Jeremy Siegel (Yahoo Finance): Should you bother with government bonds?, May 12, 2009.

• Andy Kessler (Wall Street Journal): Was it a sucker’s rally?, May 12, 2009.
You can have a jobless recovery but you can’t have a profitless one.

• Martin Wolf (Financial Times): Why Obama’s conservatism may not prove good enough, May 12, 2009.
The more the crisis unfolds, the more evident it is that incentives in the financial system were (and are) badly distorted. At the end, will the number of institutions thought “too big to fail” be as large as now and, if so, how will they be controlled?

• David Walker (Financial Times): America’s triple A rating is at risk, May 12, 2009.
The public supports the creation of a fiscal commission by a two-to-one margin. Yet Washington still sleeps.

• Steven Levitt (The New York Times – Freakonomics): This is not another Great Depression, May 11, 2009.
We are experiencing pain now, but the problems of the Great Depression were several magnitudes greater.

• Lawrence Strauss (Barron’s): Hewing to high-quality junk, May 11, 2009.
An interview with J. Matthew Philo: This winning fund manager still sees value in high-yield corporate bonds, even after an impressive run.

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