Research Zeitgeist: In Search of Good News
Perhaps reflecting an appetite for good news at a time when most of the news is unrelentingly bad, the most popular post by far this week at Research Recap was Agrochemical Sector a Bright Spot in Slowing Global Economy, based on a Standard & Poor’s report:
Thanks to continuing world population growth, improving standards of living, energy diversification into biofuels, and a cap on the amount of arable land available, the outlook for agrochemicals companies..remains favorable.
This will not come as music to organic food advocate Michael Pollan’s ears. In a lengthy open letter to the next President published in the New York Times Magazine, Pollan writes ” we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does.”
If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.
Sounds great, but it’ll be a cold (or maybe globally warmed) day before the powerful forces of agribusiness and others allow this to happen.
Back to the bad news, S&P was also responsible for the second most popular post, its prediction that the US junk bond default rate will triple in the next 12 months and could reach 10% under a pessimistic scenario that appears more likely with each passing day of gloomy economic news and financial market turbulence.
S&P had some embarrassingly bad news of its own, along with Moody’s and Fitch as Congress took the ratings agencies to task for their role in the subprime mortgage meltdown. Paul Kedrosky highlights some of the more egregious comments.
Perhaps spurred by the upcoming election and debate over taxes, our post based on an OECD report showing the growing extent of income inequality in the US, took the third spot this week.
Our Research Primers continue to be popular and the latest one from CreditSights on the options for Credit Default Swaps Regulation was no exception. And rounding out the top five with another piece of bad news was Moody’s Sees Stress on Credit Card Industry Through 2009.
Research Recap Quote of The Week
Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact. - Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan acknowledging to Congress that his free market ideology pushed him to make decisions that he wished he had not made. (Transcript)
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