Invisible hand

Here

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Two nice posts from Greg Mankiw

Parmigiano bailout (this affects me negatively both as an Italian taxpayer and Parmigiano consumer)

The real impact factor

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Stink and perfume!

In Japan

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An ad for the Big 3 bailout

Here

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Links

The year of exceptionally low returns
New Economics Blogs Woodward and Hall and Andy Harless. Both found here
Krugman's Nobel lecture: here and here and misreporting
Double whammy. This is really bad news. Those who need them don't use the drug and those who smoke them get high and get infected!
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Probably the best website, ever

Any music video, any time! Here
Addendum:
OK, Raja is right, No Sex Pistols either. MTV, for the moment you still suck
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It's all Disney's fault

If you ask my 3-year old daughter to describe herself she will answer with one of the following 4 words: principessa, princess, amira, princesse (the answer will only depend on the language in which the question was asked). Until yesterday, I thought that it was our fault and that we should stop spoiling her and treating her like royalty, but after reading this, I realized that it is all Disney's fault.

But it gets worse. This piece suggests that Disney's redesign of the eyes and mouths of its female characters could be linked a recent increase in teen pregnancy (what was Sarah Palin's daughter watching?).

Maybe, I should only let her watch Disney's evil characters. Check this out.
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The crisis in one chart

From Jeff Frankel
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Job market horror story

Chris Blattman tells one and asks for more. I posted my own which is: The department head invited me to dinner to his house after the talk, his wife got drunk and hit on me.
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Keynesian arithmetic

Unpleasant, indeed.
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Weird & Interesting

Floating tits.
Somali pirates buy Citi
Real pirates
Krugman's verdict and what he was really thinking when he met Bush

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We

Big endowment big losses

Read this: The Harvard endowment, the biggest of any university, stood at $36.9 billion as of June 30, meaning the loss amounts to about $8 billion.
8 billion is about half the GDP of Lebanon.
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Scientology

Here.
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Bagels

I laways thought that they suck, but da wife and my friends love them (I think that Luca is the the only one who agrees with me). So, here it goes.
Friends in DC, check this out: there's a great, relatively new bagelry in Rockville, called Goldberg's. Their bagels are the only bagels I've ever had in the D.C. area that are worthy of the name.
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End of the World?

In Geneva, we have been waiting for the end of the World since September (here and here). Angel just sent me this nice book review. The key sentence is: How many times does the end of the world as we know it need to arrive before we realise that it’s not the end of the world as we know it?
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Books

I tend to be a compulsive reader (and book buyer, da wife gets very scared when she sees me surfing amazon.com), but recently I've been busy and I haven't been reading much. However, I just finished White Tiger and I loved it (the book also mentions the New Delhi market where I bought the book! By the way, buying books in India is fantastic).
In the meantime, the world entered in full Bolanomania. I haven't read 2666 (but Tyler Cowen recommends this book review which ends with: Bolaño has joined the immortals.). However, I did read The Savage Detectives (no detectives in the book) and I have mixed feelings about it. I loved some parts of the book and found other parts very boring, and, yet, I have the feeling that the good parts wouldn't be so good without the boring parts. I also often think about the book (and I read it almost two years ago), so it must be a good book.
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Barclays Capital on Ecuador's default

Barclays Capital Research has an excellent piece on potential contagion from Ecuador's default. One of the authors is my friend and co-author Eduardo Levy Yeyati (in fact, the piece is partly based on our past research). Unfortunatley, the piece is not available on the net.
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The new US Treasury Secretary

The New Republic has a very nice profile (the story was written before the appointment). Free Exchange (the blog of The Economist) speculates on who will replace Geithner at the NY Fed.
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SING TO THE TUNE OF 'BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY' BY QUEEN

Is this the real price?
Is this just fantasy?
Financial landslide
No escape from reality

Open your eyes
And look at your buys and see.
I'm now a poor boy (poor boy)
High-yielding casualty
Because I bought it high, watched it blow
Rating high, value low
Any way the Fed goes
Doesn't really matter to me, to me

The whole text is here.
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Rose

Kids who love "rose" (pink) even more than my daughter.
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LACEA, lot's of good stuff but also some bad news

I am on my way back from LACEA. I had no time to enjoy Rio but I saw lots friends (and I was surprised to find out that many regularly read No Original Content) and the conference was really good. Great papers with high policy content, so far away from standard ivory tower stuff.

Because of my commitments with the Economia panel I lost many interesting sessions, but I did manage to listen to Abhijit Banerjee’s fantastic interpretation of India’s economic success (with a discussion of how, in his view, India and China are screwing all other countries at the same stage of the development process) and Ricardo Hausmann’s discussion of internal decoupling in Latin America (Ricardo could be asked to give talk about the standard deviation of the temperature inside his refrigerator and still manage to make it fascinating).

Of course, the fact that there were so many good papers is not so surprising. Given the policy-obsession of Latin American economists, LACEA is always a good conference. The most surprising thing was a very bad plenary (or semi-plenary) presentation. Probably the worse since I have been going to LACEA. I hope that my friends will not suffer too much.
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Friends with nice houses

The Wall Street Journal has an article about the house of my friend, coauthor, and former colleague Ernesto Stein.
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Luca Ricci on Business Week

Luca, who also used to be a rollerblader, tells Business Week about the employment effects of the crisis.
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A cloudy day in Ipanema

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Off to LACEA

The conference is very good (the program is here), the journal is excellent (check out the editorial board) and the place, well, uh uh, how do you describe Rio? You can listen to this (in English with Stan Getz here) or read Tyler Cowen who concludes: "Might Brazil be the best place, period? " (the only problem is that the weather seems to be crappy right now)
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