Bailout

Counterparties

Posted on February 28, 2011
?It?s 50 cents on the dollar,? Madoff said. ?These people probably would?ve lost all that money in the market.? -- NYM

Annals of white-collar crime, James Altucher edition

Posted on February 28, 2011
Rupert Murdoch is one of the most successful businessmen in the world. But his company is being buffetted hard by ethics scandals -- phone hacking in the UK, and Roger Ailes allegedly suborning perjury in the US.

Adventures in CDS reporting, GM edition

Posted on February 28, 2011
GM debt has been through a lot of late. In May 2009, car czar Steve Rattner made a bold and unexpected decision to nationalize the company rather than leave it with debt outstanding.

Did Michael Lewis libel Wing Chau?

Posted on February 28, 2011
Is this a case of reality copying satire? A couple of weeks ago, Michael Lewis caricatured the dissenters from the FCIC report:

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Silicon Valley hubris watch, Mary Meeker edition

Posted on February 25, 2011
Maybe it's the Palo Alto drinking water? It's got to be something like that, in any case -- some kind of causal explanation of why so many people start fancying themselves experts on public policy the minute they become successful in Silicon Valley.

Stock-listings chart of the day, global edition

Posted on February 25, 2011
My colleague Peter Rudegair asked me a good question last week: even if the number of stocks listed in the US is falling dramatically, what's happening in the rest of the world?

Why Glencore?s going public

Posted on February 25, 2011
I can highly recommend the big Reuters report on Glencore, which is likely to go public some time in the second quarter at a valuation somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 billion.

Counterparties

Posted on February 25, 2011
How can Buddy Fletcher's tax returns show income of $1.5m from 2007-9 when he was paid $13.5m in dividends alone? -- NYT

Counterparties

Posted on February 24, 2011
Deutsche Bank's algos go rogue in Korea -- Bloomberg

ETFs jump the shark, FactorShares edition

Posted on February 24, 2011
Sometimes, financial innovations seem like a good idea at the time, and it's only later, after everything has gone pear-shaped, that it becomes clear we would have been much better off without them. Other times, financial innovations are clearly a bad idea from the get-go:

How Goldman Sachs is still running New Jersey

Posted on February 24, 2011
Who is responsible for turning New Jersey governor Chris Christie from an uninspiring and inchoate peddler of conservative platitudes into the major anti-union force that he is today? Step up, Mr Squid:

Vikram Pandit?s deceptive reporting

Posted on February 24, 2011
On February 14, 2008, John Lyons, the examiner in charge of large bank supervision at the OCC, sent Citigroup and its auditors a scorcher of a letter.

Why it pays to ignore the market

Posted on February 24, 2011
At the end of 2008, the loan market was in stunningly bad shape. There was almost no bid for loans in general, and cov-lite leveraged loans in particular were treated like they were radioactive.

Will the government?s mortgage settlement work?

Posted on February 24, 2011
Back in November, Michael Barr told me that by the end of the first quarter this year, the government should be in serious discussions with banks about how they're going to fix their broken mortgage operations.

The secrecy of the FDIC, FOIA edition

Posted on February 24, 2011
Russell Carollo, of Mark Cuban's JunketSleuth, has a great post up today about the way in which the FDIC aggressively rebuffs FOIA requests that other government agencies are happy to comply with.

Counterparties

Posted on February 23, 2011
Plutocracy now -- MoJo

The Salmon-Cottrell HuffPo bet

Posted on February 23, 2011
A couple of weeks ago, Robert Cottrell took issue with my post explaining why the NYT is lagging behind the Huffington Post in terms of reader engagement.

Vulture funds in distress

Posted on February 23, 2011
Playboy has long mixed its girlie pics with serious journalism, but it's not always obvious why. Take the December 2010 issue, for instance. It includes a fantastic investigative piece on vulture funds by Aram Roston, which isn't advertised on the cover and which wasn't placed online either until I found out about it a few days ago and started nudging them.

Why do we want stocks to go up?

Posted on February 23, 2011
Comment of the day comes from TFF:

DSK, PPK, WTF

Posted on February 23, 2011
As Dominique Strauss-Kahn continues his campaign-in-all-but-name for the French presidency, another Gallic technocrat, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, is running for president of Peru.

Austerity?s inauspicious historical precedents

Posted on February 23, 2011
One of the best aspects of being a journalist is that you get to talk at length to the most knowledgeable and interesting experts on just about any subject you can think of. For me, yesterday was a prime case in point: a long and fascinating lunch with James Macdonald, the author of my favorite book on the history of sovereign debt.

Counterparties

Posted on February 22, 2011
An important paper by David Miles concluding "that the amount of equity capital that is likely to be desirable for banks to hold is very much larger than banks have held in recent years and also higher than targets agreed under the Basel III framework" -- Bank of England

Moving away from homeownership

Posted on February 22, 2011
After I appeared on All Things Considered this weekend, I got an incredibly gratifying email from a listener in McLean, Virginia, who's moving to Jupiter, Florida:

Privatizing Wisconsin

Posted on February 22, 2011
Ed at Gin and Tacos picked up on a particularly audacious section of the Wisconsin budget-repair bill yesterday: the governor can sell off any state-owned heating, cooling, and power plants he likes, at any price, to anybody he wants, without any kind of auction or bid-solicitation process, and such a sale would be defined as being in the best interest of the state and to comply with criteria for certifying such a transaction.

The steady-savings retirement plan

Posted on February 21, 2011
Wade Pfau has a fascinating paper out called "Safe Savings Rates: A New Approach to Retirement Planning over the Lifecycle".

The dynamic economics of LCD Soundsystem tickets

Posted on February 19, 2011
A clear narrative emerged pretty quickly in the wake of last week's LCD Soundsystem ticket fiasco. Annie Lowrey tried and failed to get tickets when they went on sale at 11am on Friday, but was foiled:

Counterparties

Posted on February 18, 2011
Regulators to Hit Largest Mortgage Servicers with Enforcement Orders; Fines Likely -- American Banker

How much value do public markets add?

Posted on February 18, 2011
It wasn't much of a debate, sadly, when I talked the decline of the public markets with Andrew Ross Sorkin: he told me that he pretty much agrees with me.

Junket of the day, Barcelona edition

Posted on February 18, 2011
Victoria Barret reports on the nice little deal that Dan Frommer has going on in Barcelona: "Samsung was generous enough to sponsor our trip", in the words of Frommer himself.

Learning from Boeing?s outsourcing disaster

Posted on February 18, 2011
Michael Hiltzik has a fantastic column on Boeing's outsourcing disasters in the LA Times; it's well worth reading the whole thing, complete with a link to a prescient 2001 paper by Boeing technical fellow LJ Hart-Smith.

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