Bailout

Counterparties

Posted on March 12, 2010
The RSS debate, cont: Jack Shafer piles on -- Slate

Whither Ernst & Young and Linklaters?

Posted on March 12, 2010
Blogging's going to be light-to-nonexistent today, since it's a travel day for me. But with all the renewed attention on Lehman Brothers (be sure to check out Antony's piece on the report), it's worth wondering what might happen to Ernst & Young, in the US, and to Linklaters, in the UK.

Counterparties

Posted on March 11, 2010
Don't cork up consumer financial protection! -- Prospect

What?s the instability risk of CDS markets?

Posted on March 11, 2010
Kevin Drum has a couple of good questions about credit default swaps, and the final link in his post literally made me laugh out loud, so I'll do my best to answer him.

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Whither financial reform?

Posted on March 11, 2010
Many thanks to Tim Fernholz, of The American Prospect, and Taylor Griffin, of Hamilton Place Strategies, for helping me out via IM this afternoon to explain to me what on earth is going on with Chris Dodd and the financial regulatory reform bill. The Reuters headline says that talks have failed, and that Dodd is going solo, but in fact it's not quite as bleak as that.

Still looking for a climate-change strategy

Posted on March 11, 2010
Initial reaction to my Climate Desk bleg has been pretty interesting. I'm looking for companies which are taking a serious strategic look at managing the risks of climate change, and so far I haven't really found any. The on-topic responses I have received have generally fallen into two categories: "look at the reinsurers", and "look at us, we're doing a great job reducing our carbon emissions".

It?s OK to close expensive credit cards

Posted on March 11, 2010
I'm a big admirer of David Lazarus, of the LA Times, but I think he was a bit credulous on Monday when he complained about the downside of closing credit cards.

Why inflation is worse for investors than default

Posted on March 11, 2010
Turan Bali, Stephen Brown, and Mustafa Caglayan have a new paper out with an interesting result:

Twitter datapoint of the day

Posted on March 11, 2010
Is Twitter becoming less social and more of a news feed, where people just follow celebrities rather than interacting with their friends? Julianne Pepitone of CNN Money would have you think so:

The payday lender CFPA carve-out

Posted on March 11, 2010
Binya Appelbaum has the latest news on the shape of the consumer financial protection legislation which is likely to come out of the Senate:

Counterparties

Posted on March 10, 2010
Shahien's en fuego. Here he finds a damning HAMP statistic on page 17 of a boring Treasury PDF -- HuffPo

Why Geithner went on background

Posted on March 10, 2010
Kevin Drum asks a good question about the background blogger briefing at Treasury:

The Climate Desk

Posted on March 10, 2010
I'm a little scared and more excited to kick off a serious and ambitious exercise in collaboration across a spectacular range of websites, including Center for Investigative Reporting, Grist, Mother Jones, Reuters, Slate, The Atlantic, Wired, and WNET...

Why did Nick Denton truncate Gawker?s RSS feeds?

Posted on March 10, 2010
Yesterday, Gawker Media truncated its RSS feeds, and former Gawker editorial honcho Lockhart Steele immediately tweeted that "the only thing that excited me about Gawker's RSS truncation was picturing @felixsalmon's head explode when he heard the news"...

That stubbornly high credit card debt

Posted on March 10, 2010
Total credit-card debt outstanding dropped by $93 billion, or almost 10%, over the course of 2009. Is that cause for celebration, and evidence that US households are finally getting their act together when it comes to deleveraging their personal finances? No...

The perfect overdraft

Posted on March 10, 2010
What to make of BofA's decision to abolish overdraft fees on debit-card purchases? Josh Duboff says it's "kind of undeniably great", James Kwak says it's a good thing, and the Center for Responsible Lending says that it's a GOOD thing. Only Kevin Drum spies a fly in the ointment:

How to regulate CDS

Posted on March 10, 2010
Go read CFTC head Gary Gensler's speech on regulating credit default swaps: it's by far the best thing written on the subject to date. He's absolutely right about pretty much everything, and it would be amazing if the Europeans, who seem much keener to start regulating these animals than we are in the US, were to use it as a blueprint for their own CDS reform.

Annie Leibovitz?s new creditors

Posted on March 09, 2010
Well done to Annie Leibovitz, who has managed to extricate herself from her unpleasant embrace with the aggressive and litigious Art Capital Group. Her new sole creditor -- and we can only guess at how much the principal amount she owes has risen to at this point -- is Colony Capital, the $30 billion private-equity shop which normally has its eye on much bigger deals.

Counterparties

Posted on March 09, 2010
Whole Foods shareholders fight back -- Reuters

Lies and truth on sovereign CDS

Posted on March 09, 2010
It's not just the NYT: now the BBC is printing "explanatory" articles about credit default swaps which are simply wrong. Check out the factbox:

Roger Lowenstein vs the CFPA

Posted on March 09, 2010
Roger Lowenstein has a column up on Bloomberg with the headline "Smart Banks With Dumb Customers Don?t Exist" -- which just goes to prove that smart writers with dumb ideas do exist. Ryan Chittum has already done a good job dismantling the piece, but I feel the add to add my own $0...

The problem with municipalities buying swaps

Posted on March 09, 2010
Gretchen Morgenson, take note: this is how to write a good article about municipalities dabbling in derivatives.

Why Treasury doesn?t like principal write-downs

Posted on March 09, 2010
Well done to Shahien Nasiripour, who did the best job of anybody, at the Treasury blogger meeting yesterday, at getting Treasury's officials to commit news. Specifically, he asked about Sheila Bair's sensible idea that mortgage principal write-downs can help keep homeowners in their homes while also maximizing the value of the mortgage to the issuing bank...

Job creation datapoints of the day

Posted on March 08, 2010
Lending to small businesses is often a spectacularly good way of creating jobs -- and almost always creates more jobs per dollar spent than any kind of infrastructure investment. One can argue at length about just how many dollars it costs to create one job in the infrastructure field, but whatever numbers you come up with, they're going to be much higher than, say, the numbers that Linda Levy, the CEO of Lower East Side People's Federal Credit Union, gave me for our small-business lending...

Why it?s silly to blame CDS for Greece?s woes

Posted on March 08, 2010
Rajiv Sethi has a good blog entry taking issue with my view on credit default swaps, which The Money Demand does an equally good job of answering. But Rajiv then asks this question in the comments:

Bloggers @ Treasury

Posted on March 08, 2010
Treasury had its second big blogger meeting today, where Tim Geithner and other Senior Administration Officials (sorry, ground rules) fielded questions from a group of bloggers* which tilted heavily towards the newsier end of the spectrum. The Center for American Progress was there in force, as were the Atlantic and the Huffington Post; the less corporate bloggers from last time round (David Merkel, Tyler Cowen, Yves Smith, Steve Waldman, John Jansen, Michael Panzer, Kid Dynamite) were absent this time.

Organic wine datapoint of the day

Posted on March 07, 2010
Meg Sullivan has a good write-up of a paper by Magali Delmas and Laura Grant, which asks a simple question: Why would wineries seek costly eco- certification without informing their customers about it?

Link-phobic bloggers at the NYT and WSJ

Posted on March 07, 2010
Clark Hoyt, the NYT's public editor, has a good post-mortem on l'affaire Zachary Kouwe, and asks whether "the culture of DealBook, the hyper-competitive news blog on which Kouwe worked" was partly to blame for his plagiarism.

The NYT jumps the CDS shark

Posted on March 06, 2010
If Paul Krugman and others want the New York Times to be the paper of record, especially when it comes to matters economic, they're going to have to do better than this: Like the credit default swaps that hid Greece?s obligations, the instruments weighing on our municipalities were brought to us by the creative minds of Wall Street...

Iceland says no

Posted on March 06, 2010
Does any referendum, ever, get a 98% no vote -- especially when it's a referendum on a bill which was passed by a democratically-elected legislature? The first reaction is that the people have obviously spoken with one voice. But then the question arises: What have they said?

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