The Bowtie Economist's Daily Dose of 70-Word Wisdom


Reverse Engineering

10/21/2011

The Friday File: The US economy has lost manufacturing jobs as foreigners can often make things more cheaply than we can. What manufacturing remains is increasingly high end; it’s less easily outsourced. But, there are exceptions. In Americus, GA 50…

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Free Trade Will Help

10/20/2011

Earlier this week, the Congress passed free trade agreements with Columbia, Panama and South Korea. Passage may be hailed as a political achievement for promoting principals of free trade and for shoring up allies. Unfortunately, it will not do much…

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The Volcker Rule

10/19/2011

Big bank stocks are all down but shares of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley especially so. Regulatory changes like the Volcker Rule prohibiting proprietary trading hurt all big banks but especially GS and MS as they rely more heavily on…

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Slot Swap

10/18/2011

Delta and USAir are swapping slots at Washington’s Reagan and New York’s LaGauardia. In exchange the FAA is requiring that both airlines free up 8 slots at Reagan and 16 at LaGuardia. The slots will then be auctioned off by…

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A Hail Mary for Sprint

10/17/2011

Because Sprint now sells iphones (as of 10/1/11), its bottom line will take a hit. The extra subsidy cost of selling an iphone to an existing Sprint customer (rather than a Droid phone) is $100. Based on data from Verizon…

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Payroll and Playoffs, Unrelated?

10/14/2011

The Friday File: Baseball’s 3 teams with the highest payrolls are watching the playoffs on TV. The Yankees ($202.6 million) were upset by the Detroit Tigers ($105.7 million), while the Philadelphia Phillies ($172.9 million) were upset by the St Louis…

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What’s my Share?

10/13/2011

Firms frequently buyback their own shares when they think they are undervalued. Problem is, firms often get it wrong! So far this year HP has spent $7.6 billion to buy 200 million shares at about $38/share. In ’10 HP spent…

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Nobel Prize Winners in Economics

10/12/2011

The Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to Tom Sargent at NYU and Chris Sims at Princeton. Sargent’s work has helped us understand the impact of permanent changes in economic policy. Sim’s research has helped us measure the effect of…

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Megaprofitable Texting

10/11/2011

Last year about 2 trillion text messages were sent in the US generating more that $20 billion in revenue for cell phone companies. Experts estimate that it costs cell phone companies about a third of a cent to send a…

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Cricket Cost-Benefit

10/07/2011

The Friday File: Despite the added risk of becoming bird food, male crickets gallantly give their mates priority in crawling into safe burrows. In a recent issue of Current Biology, researchers found paired males were 3.9 times more likely to…

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