Bailout

Simon Johnson joins HuffPo

Posted on January 29, 2010
This is a great hire: the Huffington Post has brought on Simon Johnson as a contributing business editor, underscoring the way in which the historically staid and boring intersection of politics with economics is pretty much the hottest game in town right now.

Arbitrary CAPM

Posted on January 29, 2010
Emanuel Derman passes on an email from a former student, who's now working at ****:

Goldman-bashing at Bloomberg and Fortune

Posted on January 29, 2010
It's Goldman-bashing time again (when isn't it), with Michael Lewis returning to the same source of comedic gold that he's mined in the past. His new column should be here, but isn't; Alphaville has excerpts.

Talking to Nouriel

Posted on January 29, 2010
I'll be doing a live interview with Nouriel Roubini here on Reuters.com in a couple of hours (6:20pm Davos time, 5:20pm GMT, 12:20pm ET), asking him questions from readers. So if you have anything you want me to ask him, leave a comment on this blog or on the liveblog, or send a tweet with the #askroubini hashtag...

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The US loan-mod fail

Posted on January 28, 2010
Mike Konczal has an excellent two-part blog entry on the state of the mortgage market, and it only reinforces my belief that the crisis isn't over and that both the housing and the banking sectors are going to get much worse.

Global financial regulatory reform falls apart

Posted on January 28, 2010
Is financial reform shattering into so many different pieces that it'll never become the strong, coherent, globally-unified project that it needs to be to get popular support and avoid regulatory arbitrage? I fear so.

Counterparties

Posted on January 28, 2010
Weak euro states may have "fatal" impact, says German Minister -- Reuters

Why hybrid debt instruments won?t work

Posted on January 28, 2010
This time last year, Justin Fox's idea of a clever blog entry was a video of him skiing in Davos. This year, now that he's absent from Davos and has a brand-new job at HBR, he's writing about "the attraction of hybrids like continuous workout mortgages or regulatory hybrid securities"...

The revenue-neutral NYT paywall

Posted on January 28, 2010
I hear that the brass at the New York Times expect its paywall to be revenue neutral -- the amount of money they expect to bring in from online subscriptions is pretty much equal to the amount of money they expect to lose from online advertising.

Youthful swearing at Davos

Posted on January 28, 2010
I like James Gibney's evisceration of Davospeak:

When Winkelried left Goldman

Posted on January 28, 2010
Bill Cohan gets an interview with Jon Winkelried, who left Goldman Sachs abruptly in February 2009 from his position as one of two possible successors to Lloyd Blankfein:

Acquiring companies with stock

Posted on January 27, 2010
John Gapper and Nadav Manham have both picked up on Warren Buffett's explanation of how he thinks about M&A, especially when a company is paying with stock:

Against the optimists

Posted on January 27, 2010
One of the more annoying aspects of the Davos echo-chamber is the way in which people are constantly asking each other what "the mood" is this year; the result is an inchoate consensus that since the crisis is over, markets are up, and countries are growing again, there must be grounds for optimism and the kind of yes-we-can thinking in which the World Economic Form has always specialized.

Howard Davies, man of the people

Posted on January 27, 2010
Howard Davies has taken an early lead in the Great Davos Narcissism Stakes, with this classic parenthetical:

Security at Davos

Posted on January 27, 2010
As the World Economic Forum kicks off in earnest, the only real cause of buzz so far has been the apparent suicide of its long-time security chief, Markus Reinhardt. Reinhardt was an aggressive man: he took the decision to fire water cannons at demonstrators in sub-freezing temperatures in 2001; he was also acquitted of murder in 2002 after ordering the lethal shooting of a man.

Counterparties

Posted on January 27, 2010
An astonishing chart of European sovereign vs financial CDS spreads -- Alphaville

How to give a Davos opening address

Posted on January 27, 2010
Nicolas Sarkozy gave a rather curious speech to kick off the World Economic Forum today. He started out with fiery populism, talking about how "without state intervention, the world would have imploded", and how globalization had created, pre-crisis, "a world where everything was given over to capital, and nothing to labor, in which the entrepreneur gave way to the speculator"...

The ?FDIC lotto? reason banks aren?t lending

Posted on January 27, 2010
"A California Banker" writes to Mish, giving yet another reason why banks aren't lending:

Looking for contrition in Davos

Posted on January 26, 2010
So I've arrived in snowy Davos, where with typical modesty the miscellaneous moguls will attempt to "Improve the State of the World: Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild". (Seriously, that's the official slogan this year.) The official "purpose" page is full of claptrap of the highest order -- a "Network of Global Agenda Councils" "driving the rethink" over here; "an unprecedented multistakeholder dialogue " over there; and on top of it all, naturally, "a collaborative platform that integrates Web 2...

Why it?s safe to ignore Davos

Posted on January 26, 2010
Lawrence Delevingne has got Davos completely wrong: his list of "The Only 12 Davos Panels Worth Paying Attention To" is in fact a list of the 12 panels which can be safely ignored by just about all the delegates here. Larry Summers is more likely to turn up with only one chin than he is to commit anything approaching news in his Saturday discussion with Charlie Rose...

Ordering expensive wine by mistake

Posted on January 26, 2010
If you order a $2,000 bottle of wine by mistake -- or even a $6,000 bottle, for that matter -- you have no one to blame but yourself: getting angry at the restaurant is silly, even if it's psychologically understandable. But I think there's something missing from the commentary about these cases: part of the reason for the anger is that the drinkers in question didn't get anything like full value out of the wines.

Indisciplined Democrats vs regulatory reform

Posted on January 25, 2010
Barack Obama ran what was arguably the most disciplined and on-message presidential campaign in history. But all that the Republicans need to do right now to ensure that financial regulatory reform never happens is sit back and watch the Democrats fight each other to a bloody stalemate...

The legislative headaches of the Volcker Rule

Posted on January 25, 2010
Tracy Alloway has the transcript of the White House background briefing on the new, Volcker-inspired, banking regulations. And yes, they do require extra legislation:

Capital wins over labor at Goldman

Posted on January 25, 2010
2009 was the year when stocks and unemployment both rose substantially: the ultra-loose monetary policies being followed by central banks around the world seemed to help capital more than they did labor. That's good for banks in general, and for Goldman Sachs in particular, which makes its money from markets rather than from lending.

Counterparties

Posted on January 25, 2010
Why is it that the SEC is only diligent on matters where it shouldn't be, like keeping public information secret? -- Reuters

Paywall math, Guardian edition

Posted on January 25, 2010
There's been a lot of speculation on this blog about the economics of the NYT paywall. So let's stop speculating and look at what Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, has to say on the subject. After all, the Guardian, and its website, are in a very similar situation to that of the NYT: a newspaper which has a huge online audience, but which is still losing a lot of money...

Abnormal Returns gets even better

Posted on January 25, 2010
Abnormal Returns has gone real-time! The indispensible link-fest will still arrive daily, but now that Tadas Viskantas has sold his site to StockTwits, a second column has appeared on the site, with "links in real time", mainly from Twitter.

The corporate conscience

Posted on January 25, 2010
Justin Fox kicks off his new HBR blog with a cracking post on the jurisprudence of treating corporations as persons. If John Roberts really believes that shareholders control corporations, he says, that's all the more reason not to allow corporations the rights of individuals -- and he uses Milton Friedman, of all people, to make his case:

How Justin Fox almost saved American democracy

Posted on January 24, 2010
It's auf Wiedersehen but not goodbye to Justin Fox, as he leaves his perch at Time to blog anew at HBR come Monday. His value to the blogosphere was clear from his very first post, a thousand-word disquisition on how boards of directors are a bit like an tonsils: "a largely useless, if mostly harmless, institution"...

Revisiting the uncollectable artwork

Posted on January 24, 2010
I think, but I'm not sure, that I'm a key vector through which A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter started going viral: my blog entry on the artwork got picked up by Tyler Cowen (and others) before the artist, Caleb Larsen, was interviewed by Wired.co.uk in a story which was then Slashdotted...

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