Meagan Chung pleads innocent

In one of the longest news articles I can remember reading in the New York Post, the SEC's Meagan Chung -- the woman who investigated Bernie Madoff in 2005 and cleared him of fraud -- tries, unconvincingly, to defend herself. Instead, she comes across as even less competent than we thought:

[Said Cheung:] "If someone provides you with the wrong set of books, I don't know how you find the real books." ...
Regarding Madoff specifically, Cheung said, "I never met the man."...
Markopolos gave the investigators a long memo that flatly said that

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Hurrah for markets!

OK, some of the things said about markets are not entirely and wholly true. They do not cure athlete's foot nor do they ensure that middle aged jounos are continually surrounded by blog groupies (alas and alack!).

However, they do often have within them the seeds of the corrections to their own problems.

The monthly survey of recruitment consultants by KPMG and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation shows that the contraction of the labour market accelerated in December with the number of people placed in permanent and temporary jobs falling at the sharpest rate since the series...

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The Austrian view

This looks like good news to me.

Despite existing business owners confidence levels collapsing since last September, start-up activity has remained remarkably resilient, shaking off an early decline in the Spring to end the year only marginally lower than in 2007.

The number of new businesses opening their doors in the three months to September fell by just 4pc to 129,282 against expectations of a slump of between ten and 15pc, according to the latest industry analysis from the British Bankers' Association.

Now it does depend a little on your view of what a recession is. Mine about...

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Will Brown benefit from the interest rate cuts?

The VAT cut may have been economically and electorally irrelevant, but might all these interest rate cuts deliver for Gordon Brown? History will be made tomorrow when the Bank of England cuts rates to the lowest in its 315-year history - probably by half a point, to 1.5%. And even that will probably fall to 1% before Easter. A friend emails to say he has become a "reluctant buyer of Gordon Brown stock" - his mates are getting cheap mortgage deals, at 4% or 4.5%, saving hundreds a month. This will create a feelgood...

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In favour of arts spending

Michael Kaiser makes some good arguments in favor of increased arts funding, but unfortunately he mixes them up with bad ones, and he glosses over the best ones. The result is that Tyler Cowen gets to take the moral high ground by saying that "culture for the rich" is "not a priority".

In reality, however, arts funding is a great way of spending any stimulus money, as anybody with a pocket calculator to hand might be able to work out from a couple of the numbers in Kaiser's piece:

The arts in the United

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