Bailout

Wall Street?s billion-dollar Madoff tax

Posted on February 18, 2011
Today's FT reveals the astonishing amount of money that Irving Picard and other Madoff-related clean-up artists are going to make from the world's biggest ever Ponzi:

How the S&P 500 destroyed $4.5 trillion

Posted on February 18, 2011
At the end of 1993, Cisco Systems had a market capitalization of $8 billion. At the end of 2010, it was worth $112 billion. It hasn't paid dividends, which makes things easy: if you want to calculate the amount of shareholder value that Cisco created between 1993 and 2010, you just subtract the former figure from the latter and get an impressive $104 billion...

Counterparties

Posted on February 17, 2011
Cricket-mad Jain inks Deutsche Bank ire -- Indian Express

The false promise of compound interest

Posted on February 17, 2011
A loyal reader on the sell side emails to object in strenuous terms to my contention that, when it comes to saving for retirement, "by far the most important number is the total sum of dollars that you?ve put into your retirement funds over time; the annualized rate of return on those dollars is secondary".

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How microfinance can work

Posted on February 17, 2011
David Roodman has some great comments on the video debate between me and Matthew Bishop.

MBIA?s volatile credit protection

Posted on February 17, 2011
It's rare that prepared official testimony moves markets. But that's what happened when MBIA CEO Jay Brown appeared in front of the New York State Assembly Standing Committee on Insurance yesterday -- a body which, it's fair to say, rarely appears in the news.

The economics and politics of valuing life

Posted on February 17, 2011
I love Binya Appelbaum's NYT article on the various different values of a human life which are used by government agencies to justify regulations.

Counterparties

Posted on February 16, 2011
Gibson Dunn is representing pro bono a bunch of millionaires fighting against the safety of their neighbors -- Streetsblog

The for-profit microfinance debate

Posted on February 16, 2011
In which Matthew Bishop of the Economist schools me on the benefits of for-profit microfinance.

The muni loan market emerges

Posted on February 16, 2011
When I was worrying about munis last week, I said that "the amounts here are far too big for states to go to the loan market instead: if investors won?t buy bonds, banks won?t lend the states the money they need".

Kabulbank datapoint of the day

Posted on February 16, 2011
Back when we last checked in on Kabulbank, no one really knew how big the hole there was, and the government was still saying that it was solvent. But now Dexter Filkins has some concrete numbers, and they're insanely huge:

Counterparties

Posted on February 15, 2011
Ivan Oransky reveals the name of the idiotic press officer: it's the University of Manchester?s Aeron Haworth -- Embargo Watch

Bankruptcy charts of the day

Posted on February 15, 2011
This chart comes from the official news release on US bankruptcy filings in 2010:

Duncan Niederauer?s English-German phrasebook

Posted on February 15, 2011
NYSE CEO Duncan Niederauer doesn't speak German, despite the fact that he was a Grand Marshal in the 2008 German-American Steuben Parade of New York.

Art as an investable asset class

Posted on February 15, 2011
I sat down last week with Noah Horowitz and Marion Maneker to talk about art as an investable asset class.

What the decline of stocks means for you

Posted on February 15, 2011
Tim Duy asks me whether "the public is being pushed into a retirement dead end", and "how the average investor should manage their 401k plans in this environment". I have two answers to this; one's facile and the other's quite important.

Counterparties

Posted on February 14, 2011
Londoners are insisting on secure bike parking, lockers and showers before agreeing to switch employers -- Standard

The decline of the public stock market

Posted on February 14, 2011
That was quick! Barely had my NYT op-ed on the decline of public stock exchanges hit the web this evening than Ira Stoll was ready with a trenchant reply.

Why you can?t see great video

Posted on February 14, 2011
I spent a large chunk of Saturday looking at The Clock. Christian Marclay's video masterpiece is currently on show at the Paula Cooper gallery in New York, and is also part of the British Art Show, which is touring the UK and will open in London on Wednesday.

Pimco datapoints of the day

Posted on February 14, 2011
Pimco's $240 billion Total Return Fund is, by most measures, the largest fund in the world. A handful of sovereign wealth funds are larger, but none of them trade nearly as actively or aggressively as Bill Gross.

Why the stock market is increasingly irrelevant

Posted on February 14, 2011
I'm sad that my NYT op-ed on the decline of stock exchanges went to press too late to include the bonkers rhetoric emanating from Chuck Schumer:

Should bankers fly to China?

Posted on February 13, 2011
The advantage of being pseudonymous is that you can be honest. Here's TED:

How an investment banker thinks about cricket

Posted on February 13, 2011
Anshu Jain -- yes, that Anshu Jain -- has filed a lovely column for Newsweek on the subject of the cricket World Cup. Even as a magazine writer, he still behaves like the investment banker he is:

Counterparties

Posted on February 11, 2011
Whitney Tilson's 13-page report on "Why We Covered Our Netflix Short" -- Value Investing

Will Denton lose his bet?

Posted on February 11, 2011
Rex Sorgatz asks for my opinion on who's going to win his bet with Nick Denton over Gawker Media pageviews. Can Denton get them up to 510 million in September?

Housing talk

Posted on February 11, 2011
On Wednesday, before this morning's Treasury report on mortgages came out, I talked about the issues facing the market with my favorite fixed-income pundit, Agnes Crane.

Judging Treasury?s housing report

Posted on February 11, 2011
I'm impressed with Treasury's long-awaited report on reforming the US housing market.

Counterparties

Posted on February 10, 2011
Breaking the Web with hash-bangs: Why Gawker's new architecture makes little sense -- Isolani

Lehman?s indefensible mortgage modifications

Posted on February 10, 2011
In the standard narrative of the mortgage crisis, there were prescient bears who got it right, and then a head-in-the-sand majority which missed what was going on until it was too late.

Understanding Twitter?s valuation

Posted on February 10, 2011
Count me in with Paul Kedrosky: there's something extremely irritating about Shira Ovide's Deal Journal blog post this morning kvetching about how high the mooted valuation of Twitter is.

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