Carmen Reinhart, co-author of the book This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly and a professor at Harvard, talks about U.S. deficit reduction, Federal Reserve policy and tax code reform. Here is a direct link. She points out that while Fed policy may well continue lax for several more years, it is unlikely to change the slower growth trajectory of our debt deleveraging cycle.
David Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Reagan administration, talks about Federal Reserve monetary policy and Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. Here is a direct link.
High Frequency Trading (HFT) is one of the most reckless activities being tolerated in public markets today. We likely need to see another major crash or two before the practice is finally banned or more likely taxed into remission, but the end of HFT is coming. I believe we will be looking back on this practice years from now and marvel that a handful of firms were allowed to use and abuse the utility of publicly traded markets as their personal game of roulette for so long. For the real world, these rigged speculations are all our risk and no reward.
“European Central Bank policymaker Ewald Nowotny called on Thursday for a regulatory ban on high-frequency trading, saying the technique of using computer algorithms to generate multiple high-speed trades had no practical value.”
