Bailout

The stock-bond disconnect

Posted on September 21, 2010
I've been pondering the disconnect between stock and bond prices of late.

The GMAC fiasco

Posted on September 21, 2010
Yves Smith has been doing a fabulous job covering the latest fiasco at Ally Financial, the state-owned bank which used to be called GMAC.

The ethics of accepting BP?s money

Posted on September 20, 2010
There are serious ethical questions surrounding whether or not investors should own stock in BP. But is it also unethical for art galleries and museums to accept money from BP? Time's Frances Perraudin gives the people who think so a lot of sympathetic space:

Adventures in probability, market forecasting edition

Posted on September 20, 2010
Carl Richards has a cute graph:

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The whining rich

Posted on September 20, 2010
Todd Henderson's whine about how he's only scraping by on $450,000 a year in his million-dollar Chicago house is causing quite a stir in the blogosphere.

Momentum sans hindsight

Posted on September 20, 2010
Here's a great way of making money in the market.

Ben Stein?s fiscal policy

Posted on September 20, 2010
Here's Ben Stein in August 2008, when we were at the depths of the longest recession in postwar history:

Do we need an inflation target?

Posted on September 20, 2010
Tyler Cowen thinks that the Fed should adopt a 3% inflation target; Jim Surowiecki is inclined to agree. What's more, they also agree that it's not going to happen. Tyler has an interesting theory, on this front:

Women desert Wall Street

Posted on September 20, 2010
This is very bad indeed.

Counterparties

Posted on September 20, 2010
Divilians vs Tradebots -- Reformed Broker

The economics of One World Trade Center

Posted on September 19, 2010
Many thanks to Joe Nocera for raising the issue of One World Trade Center's finances.

Counterparties

Posted on September 17, 2010
Some Unsolicited Advice for Regulators -- Economics of Contempt

Elizabeth Warren?s new job

Posted on September 17, 2010
Elizabeth Warren had a conference call with left-wing bloggers this afternoon, just after being introduced to the public by Barack Obama in the White House Rose Garden.

Teaching journalists to read

Posted on September 17, 2010
I found myself at 7:45 this morning in a very posh Upper East Side club, being offered an array of ties to choose from before being allowed upstairs to take my seat between Nicholas Lemann and Victor Navasky.

#chasefail

Posted on September 16, 2010
The Chase online-banking fiasco is continuing into this morning, at least according to Twitter chatter. The bank's website went down on Monday night, was completely offline until Wednesday, and has been unreliable since then. And the response from the bank has been laughable:

Counterparties

Posted on September 16, 2010
Obama to name critic Warren to consumer job -- Reuters

Appointing Warren

Posted on September 16, 2010
It's weirdly depressing watching everybody scramble around trying to work out what on earth the kindasorta appointment of Elizabeth Warren to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau actually means. As Ryan Chittum notes, the WSJ certainly can't make up its mind: David Weidner says that Warren is being sidelined and that "someone else will make the final decisions"; the paper's news story, by contrast, says that she will have broad powers.

Americans get more sensible about housing

Posted on September 16, 2010
Remember Fannie's Mae National Housing Survey? Well, Fannie has repeated the exercise, just six months later, and chief economist Doug Duncan tells me it might even become more frequent than that, in future.

The problem with investing in hedge funds

Posted on September 16, 2010
  If you want to invest in hedge funds, how can you get a good impression of what your options are and which is best?

Blogonomics: moving markets

Posted on September 15, 2010
What's the best way to monetize a blog? I don't know how much John Hempton has made off this blog entry, but it's surely up there in the annals of the most lucrative posts of

Do employees want investment advice or not?

Posted on September 15, 2010
This Charles Schwab survey is fascinating. People want investment advice when it comes to their 401(k) plans, especially if they can get it for free. And when they take investment advice, they change their savings habits significantly. But it turns out that even when companies do provided free investment advice for their employees, the employees don't take it.

Why Japan?s FX intervention might actually work

Posted on September 15, 2010
Has a central bank ever intervened successfully in the foreign exchange market when the momentum trade was against it? The yen has been rising alarmingly of late, and now the Bank of Japan is trying to push it down.

Counterparties

Posted on September 14, 2010
White House renominates Diamond to Fed board -- Bloomberg

The quiet victory of Basel III

Posted on September 14, 2010
With a full news cycle now having been and gone since the Basel III accord was announced, a few things have come into more focus.

The biggest weakness of Basel III

Posted on September 14, 2010
I'm unapologetically happy and optimistic about the outcome of the Basel III process, and I haven't been impressed by most of its critics -- until now. In two posts, the first at the Economist and the second at The American Scene, Noah Millman does an excellent job of explaining the biggest weakness with Basel III...

Unconvincing central banker of the day, Qadir Fitrat edition

Posted on September 14, 2010
Some people are like Winston Wolfe. They're professional, they're reassuring, they solve problems, they always know exactly what to do. These are the people you want staffing a bank regulator when there's a banking crisis. And then there's Afghan central bank governor Qadir Fitrat:

More good news, for debt collectors

Posted on September 14, 2010
When the financial crisis caused a sudden stop in the availability of home equity lines of credit, credit-card default rates naturally spiked. No longer could consumers spend as much as they like, and then, when their credit-card debt got out of control, pay it all off with a cash-out refinance...

The other bits of Basel III

Posted on September 14, 2010
All the headlines about Basel III have concentrated on the new core Tier 1 capital requirements -- the amount of pure equity and retained earnings that banks are going to have to have going forwards. It was banks' core equity which proved woefully insufficient during the crisis -- hardly a surprise, when the Basel II requirement for it was just 2% -- and it's core equity which has seen the biggest beefing up under Basel III, all the way to 7%.

Sob story of the day, Glen Esnard edition

Posted on September 14, 2010
Somebody should tell the senior executives of Grubb & Ellis that their president of capital markets, Glendon Esnard, is mad as hell, he's not gonna take it any more, and that in fact he is seriously considering leaving the country altogether:

Trillium wasn?t quote-stuffing

Posted on September 14, 2010
Chris Nicholson is right, where Courtney Comstock and Marcy Gordon are wrong: the $2.26 million fine slapped on Trillium is not for quote-stuffing. Instead, it's for layering.

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