The Cleveland Fed Justifying Its Existence

….this was actually put out by the Cleveland Fed on March 1, 2010. I wouldn’t believe it unless I saw it.

[via ZeroHedge]

Bloom Energy

In case anybody missed it on 60 minutes… Sunnyvale-based Bloom Energy…
Watch CBS News Videos Online

Record Breaking Land Site Headed Back to Bank

Back at the top of the market in 2007, Candy & Candy acquired an 8-acre development site in Beverly Hills. The price? $500,000,000 – or some $1400 per square foot!
Just three years earlier, the seller, New Pacific Realty, had acquired the site for $33.5M. It was encumbered with a long-term lease to the Robinson-May department [...]

Faber: US Will Default

Here’s to some comical relief (we hope). Marc Faber on CNBC projecting most governments will default, including the US, though he conveniently left out a time frame in his statement.
My thoughts are that if we’re going to default, might as well do it now while we still have the superior military rather than wait. But [...]

The Irony of Silicon Valley

This is a post I’ve been wanting to write for a while, but until now I was not sure how or what to write exactly. It’s a bit long, but I think it is important.
Silicon Valley is the center of innovation and home to giants of industry. It’s the place companies like Cisco, Google, Facebook, [...]

Layoffs Back: Verizon 13K, Sam’s Club 11K

The other day Wal-Mart announced 11-12K layoffs at its Sam’s Club unit. Yesterday we got word that Verizon is planning on laying off roughly 13,000 employees in 2010. This comes on the back of some pretty significant cuts it made in 2009.
And today Home Depot is announcing 1,000 layoffs.
…and there will be more. Retail sales [...]

A News Digest For Today

Rather than give you another daily dose of bad news about Tishman or some other poor sap who blindly overpaid for an asset with OPM, today we present you the following interesting headlines:
1) 1-Month Treasury Bills trading negative again. This is only the 2nd or 3rd time this has happened since Lehman went under. The [...]

Fear The Boom and Bust

For the econ geeks out there….

For Shame: S&P and Moody’s Escape Lawsuit

A lawsuit alleging misconduct and responsibility against S&P and Moody’s has been dismissed by a judge in New York. The lawsuit sought to hold the ratings agency’s responsible for defrauding investors in $100B worth of mortgage backed securities.
Investors in the mortgage-backed securities claimed in their lawsuit that S&P and Moody’s misled them by disregarding ratings [...]

CRE Values At Bottom?

There’s been increasing confidence among some industry players to come out and indicate that we are at or near a bottom in prices. We’re not willing to make a call at this point, but our general feeling is that the bottom will form when we see that property which otherwise would have likely never hit [...]