Econ 201:  Savings, Investment, and Finance

Link to slides

Class notes:

• Finance and Investment

• Yield Curves (New York Times, March 18, 2015)

For interest:

• Greg Mankiw makes 9 observations about investment demand  (Dec. 16, 2009)

• What drives (or holds back) Investment Demand?  (Ezra Klein, Washington Post, July 22, 2010)

• When is it better to buy a house, and when is it better to rent?  (New York Times, May 11, 2011)

• Yield Curves:  Usually long term interest rates are higher than short term interest rates, but sometimes the relationship is reversed, and when it is...that's a warning sign of recession!  (Here is another cool animation)

• McDonald's borrows at an incredibly low rate (Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2010)

• "But I want it NOW!"  Northwestern sells of a bunch of its future Lyrica profits.  (More great reporting on this from the Daily)

• What is a share of Google worth?  (Slate, 2007.  Hmm...maybe this is something I could look up on Bing?)

• Ponzi Schemes:  How Bernie Madoff stole a serious ton of money.  Whew, people are really stupid, even smart ones.  

• Are you a good stock-picker?  Find out here!  (And no, you're not.)

• What's a "proxy battle?"  What happens when one company wants to take over another...but the people who run the second company don't want it to happen?

• Irving Fisher had some unfortunate beliefs (Yale Alumni Magazine, May/June 2012)

  • Whoa...I didn't know the half of it!   "Fisher was also a strong believer in the now-discredited "focal sepsis" theory of physician Henry Cotton, who believed that mental illness was attributable to infectious material residing in the roots of the teeth, recesses in the bowels, and other places in the human body, and that surgical removal of this infectious material would cure the patient's mental disorder. Fisher believed in these theories so thoroughly that when his daughter Margaret Fisher was diagnosed with schizophrenia, Fisher had numerous sections of her bowel and colon removed at Dr. Cotton's hospital, eventually resulting in his daughter's death.[21]"

For amusement:

• You think you can beat the stock market?   Bloomberg.com's "The Trading Game"

• Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In  (The Onion.  Sadly, this sort of thing routinely shakes up the economy.)

• Dilbert on the gains from diversifying your portfolio

• Wall Street, the 1987 movie