Friday, April 10, 2009

Key Bank Earnings Release Dates

The following are the first-quarter earnings release dates for top banks.

Goldman Sachs................ April 14

JPMorgan Chase & Co... April 16

Citigroup.......................... April 17

Morgan Stanley.............. April 21

Wells Fargo has already released preliminary results.

Overall, results should be strong as the economy is starting to turnaround and Treasury has been force feeding earnings into the banks.

1 comment:

  1. Bob

    I wonder what you would consider as testable empirical evidence of ABCT versus Keynesian/neo-Keynesian?

    I know this a tough question and an ironic one. By ironic I mean, Austrians in their ivory tower academic mode reject empiricism, yet their model to me seems to be eminently more testable (and hence "more scientific") than Keynesian/neo-Keynesianism. In a sense the theoretically anti-empirical Austrians have a more empirical base than the allegedly empirical mainstreamers, who don't actually apply empirical tests to their theories. (This reminds me of the old joke. The catholic church is infallible but often wrong, the protestants are fallible, but never wrong).

    The K/NK people proclaim their empirical credentials but always leave themselves an "out clause". For example, if a 'stimulus' package didn't work it's because the package wasn't big enough or was applied too late. This makes their proposals almost untestable.

    There is no Keynesian reference table we can look up that says if a slump has xyz size, apply a stimulus of abc amount and it will be over.

    In the real world of economic policy policy experiments are not open to reruns. Saying that a bigger stimulus package would have worked after the event, is a bit like saying that the Vietnam War could have been won had the US sent in a million men rather than a mere 500,000.

    The Keynesians have no monopoly on escape clauses either. Their's has some parallel among the the ABCT folks too. Under real world political conditions, it is sometimes not possible (at least politically) to 'do nothing'. So this Austrian 'out clause' can seem similar to the Keynesian "not big enough" out clause. To wait for the stars to align correctly and thoroughly libertarian political economy to be created before you can really try ABCT isn't very realistic. All told I think the ABCT escape clause is somewhat less squirrely than the Keynesian escape clause.

    One (mild) objection I have to ABCT is it's "one size fits all" claims. Sometimes Austrians say ABCT is the open and shut case for slumps and booms. I am inclined to think they are mostly right, but can they rule out slumps and booms caused by other stuff as well. Is ABCT the whole answer? I dunno.

    One thing I like is Rothbard's (?) definition of recessions as "clusters of entrepreneurial errors". There is an assumption here that entrepreneurial errors should have a smooth distribution over time and not bunch up. They should be "isotropic" to use a word kicked around in cosmology.

    I don't think that isotropy is a realistic assumption. My argument here is roundabout. My counter is a kind of "why buses come in threes" argument.

    Various system modellers have modelled evolutionary biology at work in simulated ecosystems (see for example, Tiera). They have found that "mass extinctions" aperiodically impact these systems without any 'exogenous" factors. To restate that, they don't need to hypothesise asteroid impacts to wipe out dinosaurs. The model seems to generate "coevolutionary avalanches" all on it's own. Whether this is what drives real world, real paleontological mass extinctions is another question.

    Anyhow my 'economic' analogy of this is that maybe "super-clusters of entrepreneurial error" can similarly be generated. I suppose the real task of identifying "super-clusters" and assorting blame is really a task for economic historians.

    This is all a little vague, of course, and the interventionist argument that governments can just fix this (hey presto!) really rests on a hypothesis of government behaviour that is both ahistorical and frankly fantasy based. We have thousands of years of experience with government and there is little in that history to imply that they ever act as selfless and wise umpires. However much the rulers' sooth sayers claim that mantle of wisdom.

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