10 Links for Thursday

Here are 10 items to keep you busy this afternoon. (All links are guaranteed to be gluten and lactose-free).

• The Roubini Backlash Begins: Roubini is clearly an intelligent fellow who has produced some interesting works. However, just as clearly, he is not a prophet or anything close. More accurately, Roubini has disingenuously promoted himself as nailing the crisis, when truthfully he was wrong until other hard working analysts fixed his broken crystal ball. (Wall St Cheat Street)

• UBS Money Laundering: What Did Phil Gramm Know? (Robert Scheer, Nation) Current Senators for rent — ex-senators for sale cheap!

• No Bull! Rally Hits the Wall (Barron’s)  The equity market has hit a wall, declared Mohammed El-Erian, the chief executive and co-chief investment officer of Pimco. After soaring on a “sugar high” induced by earnings reports that topped Wall Street analysts’ lowered expectations, stock valuations have gotten ahead of fundamentals, he told Reuters television.

• Replay of 1930? (Econbrowser)

• Bernanke, a Hero to His Own, Can’t Shake Critics (NYT) Front Page article on the Fed Chief:  He has been frustrated that many in Congress do not give the Fed what he believes is enough credit for what it has accomplished. Indeed, Mr. Bernanke has met privately with hundreds of lawmakers in recent months to explain the Fed’s strategy. Yet fellow economists are heaping praise on Bernanke for his bold actions and steady hand in pulling the economy out of its worst crisis since the 1930s.

• Will the Fall Economic “Holiday Celebrations” Come Early this Year? (Northern Trust) We had been expecting that real economic growth would emerge in the fourth quarter of this year, coinciding with the celebrations of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. We now think that it might emerge, albeit, just barely, in the third quarter, in time for the Labor Day celebration – although labor will have little to celebrate. We arrive at this conclusion from observing some economic variables that typically signal the end of a recession.

• How to Manage Your Online Life When You’re Dead (Time)

• We Know it’s August, But C’mon (Marketbeat) But besides the meanderings of the Dow and S&P some market watchers have been eyeing volume numbers which have been pretty piddling lately. True, it is August, when plenty of Wall Street players skulk away from muggy Manhattan for their share of sun and sand in the Hamptons. So a bit of sluggishness is to be expected.

• Introducing Google Social Widgets

• Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb? (NYT Magazine)

Bueno de Mesquita is one of the world’s most prominent applied game theorists. For 29 years, de Mesquita has been developing and honing a computer model that predicts the outcome of any situation in which parties can be described as trying to persuade or coerce one another. Since the early 1980s, C.I.A. officials have hired him to perform more than a thousand predictions; declassified C.I.A. studies find his predictions “hit the bull’s-eye” twice as often as its own analysts did.

Anything else tickling your fancy?