Today’s WSJ announces that the private firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), plans to sell shares to the public.  It reminds us of when other private firms have gone public and that, of course, reminds us of Akerlof’s Lemons model.  (Look it up.)
We will use KKR’s presumed value of $15 billion for our brief example.  […]

With Congress trying to ban “speculation,” and the SEC trying to make short-selling of certain stocks more expensive, there is much to write on the topic.  For example, we have been wondering about whether increases in counter-party credit risk provide a natural dampening of such speculative activity.  We will try to write more about that topic, but […]

There has been much to write about lately.  Alas, we have been too busy to do so; however, a few items in this morning’s paper compel us to write. 
First, a month ago, we asked the same titular question in this post>.  That is, why does it seem that most industrial firms have been spared losses in […]

Despite the fact that there is much to discuss this summer—it seems to be at least as eventful as the last one—we haven’t had time much time to write this month.  However, we hope to have a variety of posts on the financial and commodities markets in the next few days.
Coincidentally, those markets do remind us of the weather this year: just when it seems that calm […]

Today’s Information Age column by L. Gordon Crovitz in The Wall Street Journal is entitled, “Unloading Information Overload.”  It addresses distractions, which Mr. Crovitz seems to attribute to all that new-fangled technology that the kids have nowadays: e-mail and cell phones and text messages and the Internet.  The essay is ostensibly about “knowledge workers.”  We are not quite […]

Bartman, the All-American dog from the shadows of the Budweiser plant in South St. Louis, wishes you and yours a Happy Fourth of July!  No, he is not a Basenji, but in 1995 he looked close enough for the pound personnel to contact the local BRAT (Basenji Rescue and Transport) representative—our own chairman!  That was […]