Bailout

Counterparties

Posted on September 13, 2010
Even in New York City, $250,000 is rich -- WaPo

Adventures in information design, WSJ edition

Posted on September 13, 2010
Last week, Justin Lahart presented an interesting thesis in the WSJ:

The politics of pay on Wall Street

Posted on September 13, 2010
London fund manager Barry Olliff seems to be on the same page as Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ben Horowitz when it comes to paying employees.

Should we worry about the Basel delay?

Posted on September 13, 2010
Two of the smartest people I've met are coming out this morning with an unexpected (to me, at least) criticism of the Basel III rules.

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How the WSJ magazine fails its readers

Posted on September 12, 2010
Lucas Conley's piece on Ugg for the WSJ's magazine is a perfect example of why the WSJ shouldn't have a glossy, fashion-friendly magazine.

Basel III arrives

Posted on September 12, 2010
Basel III has arrived! The official BIS press release is here, with a wealth of information inside it. But they conveniently also supply this table, which gets to the core of the matter:

Let?s not bail out more subprime lenders

Posted on September 12, 2010
Gretchen Morgenson is absolutely right, in the words of her headline, that "Housing Doesn?t Need a Crash. It Needs Bold Ideas." The problem is that the bold idea she's pushing is not the kind of bold idea that housing needs. Meanwhile, she sidles up to a genuinely good, if not particularly bold, idea, but fails to connect her own dots:

Counterparties

Posted on September 10, 2010
Another one for the annals of security theater: "The lockdown was lifted after the pony was blown up" -- Atlantic Wire

American despond

Posted on September 10, 2010
This is the most depressing poll you're likely to see this electoral season, and it's not even political. StrategyOne decided that ordinary Americans can't possibly be worse economic forecasters than economists, so they asked whether we're going to have a double dip...

Why Basel III won?t hurt banks or the economy

Posted on September 10, 2010
The new Basel III capital ratios are going to be announced this weekend, and the banks are going to complain about how much the new ratios are going to raise lending costs and hurt economic growth. The BIS, of course, has taken these complaints seriously, and has released two monster reports calculating exactly what the impact of higher capital standards will be.

Value vs momentum chart of the day

Posted on September 10, 2010
Chart of the day comes from the Bank of England's Andrew Haldane:

HAMP failure of the day

Posted on September 10, 2010
David Lazarus manages to prompt one of the great moments in bank public relations today, which would almost be funny if it wasn't so infuriating. He's telling the story of Mike and Ellen Kahara, who signed up for a HAMP mortgage-modification program through their lender, Wells Fargo...

How income inequality is changing

Posted on September 10, 2010
Bill Easterly thinks that inequality is fractal:

A new kind of stock-price chart

Posted on September 10, 2010
I love Kristina Peterson's profile of Briargate, an algorithmic prop-trading firm (it's an anagram of "arbitrage") which has more or less given up on trading during the middle of the day.

Can you launder money through black hotels?

Posted on September 09, 2010
John Le Carré has a new book out, Our Kind of Traitor, which stars a big-deal Russian money launderer called Dima. There's not actually all that much on the mechanics of money laundering, but this would be rather clever, I think, if it actually worked:

Counterparties

Posted on September 09, 2010
WSJ vs NYT, Taiwan-style -- YouTube

Basel III: The compromise

Posted on September 09, 2010
Maybe 9% was too good to be true after all. According to David Walker, of Australia's Banking Day, a compromise with "nations including Germany, France, Italy and Japan" has knocked 0.5% off the proposed Tier 1 capital requirements, and another 0.5% off the proposed conservation buffer...

Norway?s long Greece

Posted on September 09, 2010
I'm not entirely clear on what Bloomberg's Josiane Kremer is trying to say here, on the subject of Norway's sovereign wealth fund loading up on Greek debt:

Fine Rubin!

Posted on September 09, 2010
On October 15, 2007, Citigroup CFO Gary Crittenden lied to investors and analysts listening to the bank's quarterly earnings call. He said that Citi's subprime exposure had fallen to $13 billion -- but that wasn't true. In fact, it was more like $53 billion, once various super-senior tranches and liquidity puts were included...

More reassuring news on Basel III

Posted on September 09, 2010
Robert Peston provides the latest piece of the Basel III puzzle, adding to last night's report from Australia: while the Tier 1 capital ratio looks set to be 8%, the core Tier 1 capital ratio -- the bit which is hardest to game, and which is basically just pure equity -- seems to be 7%...

A vision of gloom and chaos

Posted on September 09, 2010
Just in time for the new year, Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini have delivered a 4,000-word thumbsucker on the global political economy. Essentially, they take Mohamed El-Erian's idea of a "new normal" and start getting very specific about where and how it's going to fall apart...

Counterparties

Posted on September 08, 2010
Michael Lewis on Greece -- VF

The power and serendipity of Google Instant

Posted on September 08, 2010
Tyler Cowen has yet to make up his mind about Google Instant: it's fun, he says, "but I find it distracting and it will lose me time in serendipitous diversions".

Is it possible for the government to reduce unemployment?

Posted on September 08, 2010
There was a reasonably interesting call today between various bloggers and Jason Furman, an economic policy wonk at the White House. The main message was that the Obama administration's new economic-stimulus proposals were essentially ways of front-loading attempts to create long-term economic growth, and that unemployment would come down as and when that growth arrived.

Why Greece won?t turn itself around

Posted on September 08, 2010
If you haven't yet read Michael Lewis's fantastic piece on Greece, you should really carve out some time to do so. It's almost impossible to summarize, but suffice to say that it serves as an utterly convincing and highly entertaining 11,500-word rejoinder to the IMF's bullish case that Greece can somehow avoid default.

No reason to be optimistic about house prices

Posted on September 08, 2010
David Leonhardt has delivered yet another excellent housing column, full of sharp insights and careful thinking. The key concept in the piece is the distinction between the idea that houses rise with incomes, on the one hand, and the idea that they rise with inflation, on the other...

Counterparties

Posted on September 07, 2010
Soros gives $100 million to Human Rights Watch -- NYT

Will Basel III really deliver?

Posted on September 07, 2010
I very much hope that Die Zeit is right about the Basel III capital requirements: the numbers being mooted there are definitely at the top end of what anybody expected.

It?s a bad idea to regulate the art market

Posted on September 07, 2010
Anybody remotely attracted by this must be out of their minds:

Why regulators should be tough on bank capital

Posted on September 07, 2010
John Carney today writes about what he calls "the deeper problem" behind the Basel III negotiations: "how regulators can assess capital requirements without a functioning market process".

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