This showed up this morning. It is a discussion about how the financial blog "seekingalpha.com" was built up over the last couple of years.

Blogonomics

I'm posting it because I think people can ignore all the references to finance and substitute whatever noun they want and still get a fairly clear idea of how something can be grown actively. Now of course there probably are lots of people out there who think that being passive can never be active. More power to them!

Z'im Barb Way!

Staying the Course. Going All The Way. Bitter Enders.

Bitter Enders

Big Things seem to be underway around the world. For starters it looks like there are people out there who do not believe what is coming out of the US and will not put their money where the US mouth appears to be.

interesting observations, promoted -- cho

A couple of days after the New York Times, according to some, helped the Public Integrity Section (PIS) of the Bush Justice Department shaft Spitzer the stories start going the rounds again about how vulnerable the Times is to a takeover. This one came up this morning.Firesale at the Times. The story has some legs of its own because the hedge fund group that is accumulating shares (Harbinger) now has a bigger position than the NYT’s family owners. The structure of the company prevents them taking over ownership directly but they are now in a position to do a lot of damage to the share price. Judging from the shares’ price performance over the last few years that’s probably not something that will impinge too much on the thinking of the paper’s present ownership.

Bernanke is going to start buying mortgage-backed securities, perhaps including some in default, from banks holding them. The Fed announced the creation of a $200 billion facility to do this today, along with a $100 billion swap facility with the European Central Bank, British central bank and Swiss National Bank. Last week the Fed announced it was doubling the size of its existing facility to $200 billion. Net $500 billion is going into the banks. The stock market was up more than 400 points as a result.

originally posted 2008-03-09 12:04:24 -0500

This is material on some of the different ways in which people are approaching the question of how to deal with the fall out from the housing and mortgage crisis. There's quite a few links here, and not so much comment. I hope you have time to work through the links

Opinions, opinions. We’re all equal. We’ve all got opinions. Because we’re all equal all our opinions are worth exactly the same. And because we’re free no one is going to take them away from us. Hell No!

I read Nouriel Roubini’s Jan 26th written testimony over breakfast this morning. He’s a Professor, highly respected by people in the financial world who are unhappy with what has been going on.

I found his account kind of overwhelming. Not only because of the way he describes the effects of the reverse leverage driven financial breakdown that is underway, but also because of what he doesn’t talk about.