Interesting Picks

Humor of the day: A tradition started by the Turks, continued with Turkish exports.

BTW, I just came across the perfect Wall Street CV.

On to more serious stuff: Brad Setser on the latest TIC data.

Tim Duy, on Mark Tahoma's blog, emphasizes that we may be missing the forest in favor of the tress: Fiscal and monetary stimulus without current account imbalances adjusting may not get the US that far. This is a recurring theme in Martin Wolf's writings, one of which can be seen in the FT Year in Finance.

Useful opinion piece in the FT explains why a fiscal stimulus will not always work. Essential reading for governments trying delay IMF negotiations to get away with fiscal tightening. Of course, you being stingy is not how you go about winning elections.

Speaking of fiscal stimulus, Tyler Cowen notes of a new NBER paper that tries to evaluate empirically (using VARs) what type of fiscal stimulus works best. I don't think Tyler takes the findings as god-sent, but the Economist has a critical view.

The latest issue of IMF's Finance & Development, has quite a few interesting articles on the financial crisis. If you don't have the time to go though all, I definitely recommend the El-Erian and Kose&co. pieces as well as the Shiller profile.

FT Alphaville explains what to make of sovereign CDSs.

Speaking of the Fed announcement, Vix and more looks at: Surprise surprise- VIX trends around FOMC announcements.

More on the FOMC announcement: Greg Mankiw makes a guess on where the Fed might be headed next, while WSJ reports on part of the unusual Q&A conference call after the announcement.