Bailout

Looking for a Fed apology

Posted on January 06, 2010
The Fed is profoundly flawed, and there's a good chance it will fail at doing the job we're tasking it with. But it's the best chance we've got. That's the consensus I'm beginning to feel on the subject of Ben Bernanke's status as Fed chairman specifically, and the wisdom of confirming and expanding the powers of the Fed more generally.

Why the New York Times is boring

Posted on January 05, 2010
I agree with pretty much everything Mike Kinsley says in his broadside against unnecessarily-long newspaper articles. But what are we to do about it? The question is a tough one, as Kinsley clearly knows: the conventions he's complaining about, he says, "are traditional, even mandatory".

Why BofA needs to shrink

Posted on January 05, 2010
Brian Moynihan's first speech as CEO of Bank of America was a big one -- and, judging by the sometimes-clumsy writing, he wrote it himself. He certainly seems pretty contrite about what happened:

Wine globalization datapoint of the day

Posted on January 05, 2010
Please don't anyone tell Jonathan Nossiter about Vines of Mendoza, I fear he might never recover. Vines of Mendoza is the epitome of everything Nossiter hates about the new world of wine: it's all about globalization, homogenization, and money, rather than love and memory and terroir.

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Is the Huffington bank boycott a good idea?

Posted on January 05, 2010
Martha White has a very odd column about Arianna Huffington's attempted boycott of the big four banks. Her math is simple: the four banks have $209 billion between them in transaction deposits, and the average American bank account has $4,000 in it, which means that in order to reduce the deposit base by 5%, or $10...

The interchange-fee rip-off

Posted on January 05, 2010
Back in October, I criticized a WSJ story on interchange fees for not making it clear that they were rising rather than falling. The WSJ's chart showed interchange fees falling as a percentage of each transaction, and settled on a he-said, she-said approach where first fees seem to be rising and then they seem to be falling:

Counterparties

Posted on January 05, 2010
The $260 toaster arrives. Recession? What recession? -- Telegraph

The puzzle of high-alcohol wines

Posted on January 04, 2010
It's well known that alcohol levels in wine have been rising fast. But this was news to me:

Chart of the day: Negative net national savings

Posted on January 04, 2010
Mike Mandel is doing a great job at uncovering telling charts these days. Here's his latest:

The no-college option

Posted on January 04, 2010
What are the chances that James Altucher won't send his daughters to college? Roughly zero, is my guess. Yes, it's expensive, and yes, it's possible to make more money as an entrepreneur than as an employee. But only a small minority of people will ever have the necessary skillset to thrive in a business they founded...

When the rich get old

Posted on January 04, 2010
Mike Konczal today comes up with something which in and of itself is reason enough to set up a Consumer Financial Protection Agency: ageing boomers. As David Laibson notes,

What drives house prices?

Posted on January 04, 2010
Ben Bernanke ended his speech in Atlanta yesterday by presenting two charts. Each one has house-price appreciation in various countries on the y-axis. In the first, it's charted against monetary policy; in the second, against capital inflows.

Dismal science datapoint of the day

Posted on January 04, 2010
Alex Tabarrok blogs a recent paper by David Levy And Sandra Peart:

Rhetoric and reality in Ecuador?s default

Posted on January 04, 2010
Every so often, my web browser will veer far enough to the left to find something like this -- a heartfelt defense of Ecuador's hugely-successful bond default which takes all the domestic political rhetoric at face value.

Counterparties

Posted on January 03, 2010
Ask me anything -- Formspring

Freelancers? ethics

Posted on January 03, 2010
I was very happy when I managed to get Ben Stein fired from the New York Times for violations of its ethics guidelines. Yes, he was a freelancer, but that didn't excuse his sleazy and predatory extracurricular actions.

Google?s evil policy on shutting down blogs

Posted on January 03, 2010
On Saturday, January 2, John Hempton put up a monster 3,200-word blog entry about a fund group in Australia which has all the appearances of being, he wrote, "qualitatively different and more serious than any previous fund collapse in Australia". He was featured on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald (other SMH stories on this subject are here and here), and his blog was read around the world, partly because it continued his investigation into Paradigm, a fund-management firm owned by Joe Biden's son and brother -- a company which, he wrote, "keep being associated with cases like this"...

The new standardized mortgage estimate

Posted on December 31, 2009
James Hagerty is cautiously optimistic about the new, standardized good faith estimate form which has been mandated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. If you get one of these forms from three or four different lenders, and they all fill out this table, then being able to choose the best mortgage for you is going to be much easier than it has been until now.

The economic statistic of the decade

Posted on December 31, 2009
Mike Mandel has four nominees for his ?Economic Statistic of the Decade? award, including home prices (obvs), Chinese growth, and global trade. But the most startling one, for me, is US household borrowing:

Counterparties

Posted on December 31, 2009
How much does a Kiwi honorary knighthood cost? Ask Julian Robertson -- Stuff

Poem of the day

Posted on December 30, 2009
Martin Dickson wins the day with his fabulous tale of bankster excess, in rhyming couplets no less. Go read the whole thing, but here's a taster:

What use short selling?

Posted on December 30, 2009
I'm noticing a theme chez John Hempton: a few weeks ago he was writing about the dangers of shorting frauds, and now he's writing about the dangers of shorting an industry in terminal decline. At least he's not doing this kind of thing at book length: David Einhorn spent 380 pages detailing the dangers of shorting Allied Capital.

Those evil synthetic CDOs

Posted on December 30, 2009
Yves Smith has another long broadside today against Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and any other bank which made money on synthetic CDOs. She links approvingly to yesterday's NYT editorial, which concludes:

The Daily Curator

Posted on December 30, 2009
Mick Weinstein, the editor-in-chief of Seeking Alpha, has unveiled his latest side project, the Daily Curator. And I love it. Mick says it's a "pre-pre beta", but I hope he doesn't change too much besides the range and depth of content, because the gorgeous simplicity of the site makes it a joy to use.

Right about earnings? Win a wiretap!

Posted on December 30, 2009
Prosecutors of white-collar crime are a bit like investigative journalists, trying to connect dots. But reading Susan Pulliam's account of how the Galleon case was put together, I'm struck by how unprepossessing some of the most crucial dots were.

Counterparties

Posted on December 30, 2009
24 things that were true on this day in 1999 -- Foreign Policy

The changing landscape of the TV business

Posted on December 30, 2009
Andrew Vanacore has a long and sometimes confusing overview of the state of play in the television industry, which concentrates on the possibility that one or more networks might convert into cable channels sooner or later. But there seem to be lacunae in the story -- not least the large number of cable channels which pay for the privilege of being featured in the cable-TV lineup, rather than being paid by the cable companies.

How Feinberg set executive pay

Posted on December 30, 2009
Steve Brill has a very interesting 8,500-word story in this weekend's NYT magazine, all about Kenneth Feinberg and the process he went through to determine the pay packages of companies the US government had bailed out.

Deaths foretold

Posted on December 30, 2009
Ryan Avent worries about the incentives built into the 2010 repeal of the estate tax:

Bureaucratic fantasy of the day

Posted on December 30, 2009
Emanuel Derman wins the day with this:

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