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Saturday, July 20

20th Jul - Weekender: Markets, Regulation, Economics




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MARKETS
The "Hall-Pass" Market Is Back (For Now)ZH
The 'good-is-bad and good-is-good', or as Morgan Stanley's Adam Parker calls it, the "Hall-Pass' market is one of four regimes that investors face in the current environment.

Second-Quarter Corporate Earnings Are Revealing the Truth About the Marketdshort

Weakening Global Earnings MomemtumMacronomics

Where Did All The Revenues Go?ZH
It is not very surprising that constantly beating (lowered) earning consensus is not much of a challenge. However when it comes to revenue, where one must actually book a sale instead of relying on accounting gimmicks and borderline Reg FD-breaching sellside analyst chitchat, things are much different.

Austerity fatigue – the financial world’s latest fad phraseMacroScope / Reuters

Don’t personalize the stock marketAbnormal Returns

Global Business Confidence Slips to Multi-Year LowZH

Happy banker: 'There's something narcotic about landing a big deal'The Guardian
Happy banker, post-redundancyThe Guardian
Does a happy banker change his outlook after he is fired?The Guardian

Weekend Reads for Financial AdvisersCFA Institute
Smart Beta, Luck vs. Skill, and Behavioral Finance

Morgan Stanley is having an identity crisisQuartz
Morgan Stanley hasn’t completely adjusted to the world after the financial crisis. In Wall Street’s map of the world, the bank is in something of a no-man’s land.

Book Review: Hedge Fund Market WizardsCFA Institute

Hedge Funds Are for SuckersBusinessweek
The Big BacklashThe Reformed Broker
Are hedge funds really for suckers? Yeah, kinda. Wonkblog / WP


REGULATION
Finally, Bank Regulators Have Had EnoughPropublica

Does Dodd-Frank work? We asked 16 experts to find out Wonkblog / WP
Sunday is the third anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Act. To get a sense of how implementation has been going, I asked 16 people at the forefront of the debate to answer two questions: What has gone better than you had expected? And what has gone worse?

Remember CitigroupSimon Johnson / Baseline

SEC seeking to ban Cohen from financial industryReuters
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday in a surprising action took a step toward forcing hedge fund mogul Steven A. Cohen out of the industry that he helped build. 

SEC Accuses Cohen of Failing to Prevent Insider TradingBB
Cohen received highly suspicious information that should have caused any reasonable hedge-fund manager to investigate the basis for trades made by Mathew Martoma and Michael Steinberg, the SEC said in an administrative proceeding…

The Things Traders Say, the SAC EditionDealBook / NYT
Watch what you say in instant messages. That is one of the lessons to be drawn from the case filed by federal regulators on Friday against Steven A. Cohen, who say that the billionaire hedge fund manager failed to supervise employees accused of insider trading.

Swiss Bank Leaker: 'Money Is Easy to Hide'Spiegel
It was the most spectacular bank data leak of recent years: In 2008, former HSBC employee Hervé Falciani disappeared with the information of some 130,000 customers. He tells SPIEGEL he wants to help Europe hunt down its tax dodgers and expose a broken system.

OECD unveils plan to end 'golden era' of tax avoidanceThe Telegraph
David Cameron has called on the world’s leaders to get behind a global crackdown on tax avoidance and “break down the walls of corporate secrecy”.

OECD launches plan to stop firms 'abusing' tax rulesBBC
Existing tax rules need updating as they can be "abused" by multinational companies


OTHER
Unemployment, the output gap and wage flexibilityMainly Macro
This post is about the impact of nominal and real wage flexibility on unemployment and the output gap. It starts in an academic, abstract sort of way, but the policy implications do follow. I try and make the analysis as accessible as I can to non-economists.

The Next Social Contract Project Syndicate
The new social contract for the first half of the twenty-first century must be one that combines fiscal realism, significant room for individual preferences, and strong social solidarity and protection against shocks stemming from personal circumstances or a volatile economy.

G20 report warns of global tax chaosThe Guardian
International tax system cannot deal with mobile multinational firms that shift profits to low-tax countries, says OECD thinktank

G20 puts growth before austerity, seeks to calm marketsReuters
The Group of 20 nations put growth ahead of austerity as it seeks to rebalance a multi-speed global economy, pledging to shift policy carefully so that recovery is not derailed by volatile financial markets.

Advanced G20 countries ready to commit to debt goals after 2016Reuters
Advanced G20 economies are ready to commit to numerical targets for public debt reduction after 2016 to boost investor confidence and create better conditions for economic growth, a senior G20 official told Reuters on Saturday.

There Is No Liquidity Trap: Understanding 21st Century Monetary PolicyPIIE

Vintage Years in Econometrics - The 1950'sDave Giles

Book BitsThe Capital Spectator

Pseudo-flexible exchange-rate regimesvoxeu.org
According to the IMF, last decade saw a number of countries actively managing their exchange rates. Is this a good way for emerging economies to protect themselves from the large swings of international markets? This column presents a new ‘pseudo-flexible’ exchange rate policy for emerging economies that is both sustainable and allows for accumulating reserves in conjunction with domestic debt; resulting in low exchange-rate volatility.

What Should We Expect For Long Run Risk Premiums?The Capital Spectator

Horizon 2013Pictet
In order to calculate estimated long-term returns for the various asset classes it is necessary to devise an effective method and specific models. The uniqueness of our approach, as opposed to traditional models, is that ours is research-based and takes shifts in economic regime into account.
(direct pdf-link)

The Rules, Part XLVThe Aleph Blog
Market rents are typically fixed in size.  When a strategy to exploit a particular market inefficiency gets too big, returns to the rent disappear, or even go negative prospectively, even if they appear exceedingly productive retrospectively.