Source: Ritholtz Archive:

For fairly intelligent discussion of whether this means anything, check out the comments over at The Big Picture.

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Bloomberg has several interactive tools for filtering and ranking the the world’s billionaires.

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If you click on any of them, individual profiles come up, like for Carlos Slim":

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You can plot them by industry, gender, number of children and all kinds of other variables.

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China has been heavily investing in Africa the past few years.

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The debate over whether it’s cheaper to rent or buy a house is complicated (where you buy, down payment, size of house, etc). But looking at median prices across the nation and current insanely low mortgage rates can make now look like the best time in a while to buy. Read the comment thread on the linked blog if you want more nuance.

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If you want even more nuance, particularly if you’re buying a house as an investment, I recommend Barry Ritholtz’s 5 part article Debunking the Housing Recovery Story.

From the 2012 Military Balance report. (via)

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There’s also a 2012 Chart of Conflict – but I couldn’t find a decent sized image on their site. I think they want you to buy it.

A wonderful post over at The Big Picture that takes both liberals and conservatives to the wood shed over their abuse of economic indicators and charts that show correlation but not causation.

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Note: The comments over there are worth a read as well.

These charts make it pretty clear that the housing market still isn’t functioning anywhere near normal. (via The Big Picture)

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The “discount” below is the foreclosure price vs a non-foreclosure sale.

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Another problem brewing. The world is running out of places to kick the credit can. As usual, there is much insight to be gained from the discussion and comments over at Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture.

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Hacking money with graphics to draw attention to economic inequalities. I love that they included accurate titles and legends. (via Ritholtz)

 

Even though the “content limit” is only 140 characters, each tweet actually contains a crazy amount of meta-data. (related Economist article; via The Big Picture)

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From MSNBC and the American University: Identify your bank (or credit union) by name or location, then see how many non-performing loans and other troubled assets it has:

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of related interest is this 2010 chart that Barry Ritholtz recently noted:

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Bloomberg compiled some stunning new data on Fed loans to Wall Street banks during the crisis based across multiple programs (Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility, Commercial Paper Funding Facility, discount window, PDCF, TAF, Term Securities Lending Facility and single-tranche open market operations). (related article; via The Big Picture)

I wish I could borrow from the Fed at <2% using junk bonds as collateral. 

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You get the below charts by selecting multiple banks to compare them:

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Barry Ritholtz has another great post about the housing market over at The Big Picture.  In addition to his analytical insights, he pointed out two great tools for looking at housing markets across the country.

The first is a Rent vs Buy interactive from Trulia:

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(related Trulia article and methodology)

Second is the Wall Street Journal’s chart of price-to-income ratios (compared to the 1985-00 average).

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(related WSJ article)

A pretty comprehensive explanation of the financial crisis. (via The Big Picture)

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Updated chart of the classic Case-Shiller housing price index. On the one hand it looks like the decline may be bottoming out – but on the other, there is still massive intervention supporting the market and we could very likely overshoot fair value.

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