Blogvesting

The latest banking rescue has been widely panned by the punditry, with even Krugman voicing his dismay, yet was warmly received by the markets. The pundits are correct : this plan will not rescue the bad banks. Instead, the new plan will grease the flow of credit into the real economy, and lift all banks, [...]

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The blogosphere is awash with opinions about whether banks should be nationalized, and whether an aggregator bank to hold bad debt is a good idea. Much of the heated debate about the mechanics of a rescue is about the technical details of the rescue, devoting little time to the fundamental normative question : who should [...]

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A New York Times article today rehashes the conventional myths about deficit spending : that it is inflationary and dangerous, and that its use in extremis today must be carefully reversed in the future, lest it lead to foreign countries dumping US Treasuries and causing a cataclysmic increase in the US interest rate. The author [...]

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Nowadays, every stock seems to be trading not based on their fundamentals, but based on the fear that the economy will sink into a depression. If indeed this fear proves to be true, then buying stocks now would be a mistake. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, US GDP shrunk by 27%, pushing the [...]

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Hank Paulson’s refusal to rescue Lehman has been a rude shock to bond holders. Until last Sunday, the main losers in the financial crisis has been equity holders, while bond holders have seen their assets protected by the government. As a result, Treasury yields plunged to new lows on Monday as bond investors fled bank [...]

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Recently, the technology component of my portfolio has reached 15-20%, invested in companies with dominant market shares and minimal debt (DELL, INTC, NVDA and CYMI). The entire tech sector has been in slump in recent months due to a combination of the saturation of the desktop market in the US, and the flop of Windows [...]

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An article in the New York Times says that another blow to the US economy is about to come in the form of reduced state and city government spending for the coming fiscal year beginning July 1st 2008. Apparently, state and city spending makes up $1.8 trillion in the $14 trillion US economy, and they [...]

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I have recently finished the construction of my portfolio, with an aim of holding 10 stocks in diversified sectors. I had sought to build a value-oriented portfolio with moderate concentration. Today, I decided to take a look at how the portfolio and its various sectors are doing. As a whole, the portfolio is slightly up [...]

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Recently, I have been thinking about diversifying into foreign stocks, because of the strong possibility of a sharp fall in the value of US dollar denominated assets. The state of the US budget and trade deficits have been getting so ridiculous that even Warren Buffett, who has previously famously eschewed macroeconomic bets, has recently been [...]

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