Bailout

Will the NYT paywall be set at $10/month?

Posted on February 17, 2010
Ryan Tate has an interesting piece of gossip about a turf war at the NYT over iPad pricing:

Counterparties

Posted on February 16, 2010
"Since 1979, mortgage brokers in California have had a fiduciary duty to the people they're providing with home loans" -- Time

The problems with hardship letters

Posted on February 16, 2010
Planet Money got a letter from a correspondent worried about the hardship letter which is required as part of the loan-mod process:

Why market reporting should be ignored, part 912

Posted on February 16, 2010
If you search the NYT for the phrase "Wall Street Follows European Markets Higher", you'll find this morning's stock report at the top of the results list. Follow the link, and you'll find the latest version of the report; the headline has changed to "Shares Rise as Worries Over Greece Ease"...

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Dead Bankers

Posted on February 16, 2010
I was off the grid for most of the long weekend, which allowed me to curl up with a pulpy thriller for the first time in many, many years. I'm by no means an expert on the genre, but if you're a reader of this blog and you like such things then there's a good chance that Dead Bankers, a novel by Philip Delves Broughton, might be exactly for you; there's a paperback version here if you don't have a Kindle.

Debt demand datapoint of the day

Posted on February 16, 2010
Insofar as there's a decline in lending going on these days, it's a function of both lower demand for credit and of reduced willingness to lend on the part of banks. Bloomberg has a startling datapoint on the demand side:

The Greek derivatives aren?t Goldman?s fault

Posted on February 16, 2010
The first thing you have to know about the Greece-Goldman story is that the definitive account was published by Nick Dunbar of Risk magazine in July 2003. He kicked off by saying that the deals he was writing about "are likely to prove controversial" -- he probably never guessed just how controversial they would end up being, nor how long it would take them to achieve that status.

Simmons leaves Goldman?s board

Posted on February 13, 2010
On Tuesday, Brown president Ruth Simmons explained that the decision as to whether she should continue to sit on the board of Goldman Sachs was a complex one which would not be taken lightly:

The marriage of Figaro and paywalls

Posted on February 12, 2010
France's Le Figaro has unveiled its own freemium version of a paywall, and it's an interesting model. Fresh news is free; old news disappears into an archive. Once you've registered, you can get emailed newsletters and can comment on articles; if you pay ?8 per month you get French versions of New York Times articles and 30 articles per month from the archive, as well as various social-networking bells and whistles...

The destruction of the Polaroid photo collection

Posted on February 12, 2010
I'm disappointed in the way in which the NYT's Carol Vogel swallowed the disingenuous rationalizations of the vandals tearing apart the unique and irreplaceable Polaroid photography collection:

Financial reform in the Senate

Posted on February 12, 2010
I'm more than a little confused about the political jostling surrounding the financial-reform bill in the Senate. In the wake of Chris Dodd giving up talking to Dick Shelby and deciding to work with Bob Corker instead, he's put out a statement saying that "I am more optimistic than I have been in several weeks" about the prospects for the bill, and Daniel Indiviglio is surely right when he says that "it's definitely a significant development that even one Republican is willing to work with Dodd".

Mike Konczal is a renter

Posted on February 12, 2010
Mike Konczal is on a roll these days, pointing out how there's a strong tendency towards having one rule for the rich and another for the poor. On Wednesday he pointed out that when Fed governor Kevin Warsh called for banks to have "readily comparable" funding sources, he was really calling for exactly the kind of vanilla option that Barney Frank lost no time in removing from the act creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency...

The problems with a nationwide VMT tax

Posted on February 11, 2010
Andrew Samwick calls a tax on vehicle miles travelled (VMTs) "one of the most ridiculous policy proposals I've read in a while", and Ryan Avent responds with a defense of the idea. The weird thing, here, is that they're both right. Samwick agrees with Avent that congestion charges -- essentially VMT taxes which vary according to the route you take and the time of day that you drive -- are "worthwhile policy measures"...

The massive cost of underemployment

Posted on February 11, 2010
Those of us who have learned to always look at the formerly-obscure U6 underemployment measure on the first Friday of every month have long been shocked at the number of people who want to work full-time but who in fact are working part-time. A new study from Andrew Sum and Ishwar Khatiwada of the Center for Labor Market Studies quantifies the cost of today's unprecedented levels of underemployment on society as a whole; I can't find the version that was emailed to me online, but a shorter version is here.

Counterparties

Posted on February 11, 2010
The mother of all bank re-securitisations -- Alphaville

Counterparties

Posted on February 10, 2010
  John Paulson has only raised $90 million for his new gold fund -- WSJ

Media payscale datapoint of the day

Posted on February 10, 2010
ProPublica -- a 501(c)(3) nonprofit -- is advertising for a social media intern:

Esquire?s investment advice

Posted on February 10, 2010
Courtney Comstock is absolutely right when she runs a story under the headline "You Know It's Over When Esquire Magazine Is Telling Its Readers How To Invest In Gold Funds". In a spectacularly silly article, Esquire's Ken Kurson extolls the virtues of buying gold-denominated hedge funds, on the grounds that if the hedge fund doubles and gold doubles, then you'll end up quadrupling your money! Genius.

When pension funds shun OTC derivatives

Posted on February 10, 2010
Has Illinois's Kevin Joyce been reading Andrew Clavell? There's something quite elegant in its simplicity about this:

How Greece hid its borrowing in the swaps market

Posted on February 09, 2010
Beat Balzli has an intriguing story at Spiegel saying that Greece has been hiding the true nature of its deficits and its debt using clever derivatives dreamed up by Goldman Sachs. I believe it, although the details are sparse:

Goldman Sachs joins the blogosphere

Posted on February 09, 2010
If I may put on my hat as Reuters Blog Ambassador for a minute (really, it says that on my business card), I'd like to congratulate the urbane and loquacious Lucas van Praag for finally jumping into the blogosphere.

Counterparties

Posted on February 09, 2010
What is a bank? -- The Deal

Revamping Goldman?s board

Posted on February 09, 2010
In all the bellyaching about the governance of the biggest banks, and the fact that their boards were spectacularly unqualified to provide any kind of oversight of what they were doing, Goldman Sachs has gone largely unmentioned. But what's true of Merrill Lynch and Bank of America is true of Goldman too: its executives need some kind of adult supervision, seeing as how they work for their shareholders, rather than just for themselves...

When Germany bails out Greece

Posted on February 09, 2010
Faisal Islam does a great job explaining the problems facing Greece, and why Germany is likely to come up with some kind of bailout:

FT.com?s price hike

Posted on February 09, 2010
What's happened to the FT's online subscription rates? Leigh Caldwell was paying £6.12 per month last December, but then his debit card expired, he lost his FT.com access, and he went back to the site to renew. When he got there, he found that the renewal rate he was offered was more than double what he was paying before: £12...

Blogonomics: Monetize via acquisition

Posted on February 09, 2010
That's two in as many weeks, I think: first Abnormal Returns was bought by StockTwits, and now Footnoted has been bought by Morningstar.

The second-mortgage underwriting failure

Posted on February 08, 2010
In case you missed it on Friday, it's worth checking out Tracy Alloway's post about second mortgages in the US. She makes a very good point about how they're making it a lot more difficult for mortgages to be modified -- but we kinda knew that already...

Counterparties

Posted on February 08, 2010
The new reality: When people get scared, they *sell* gold, they don't buy it -- Barron's

Debt taxation datapoint of the day

Posted on February 08, 2010
I've been banging on for a while that one key cause of the crisis was the tax-deductibility of interest payments, and the incentive that gives companies to finance themselves with dangerous debt rather than safer equity. But I didn't realize it was this bad...

Can German wage hikes save Greece?

Posted on February 08, 2010
Marco Annunziata has a diagnosis of what ails the PIGS:

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