Bailout

Decode your fund brochure

Posted on December 15, 2009
Joshua Brown has a very handy cut-out-and-keep mutual-fund-brochure decoder. Now, if only he could do the same thing for Morningstar ratings!

The loan dilemma

Posted on December 15, 2009
Barack Obama wants the banks to start lending again:

Putting source documents online, cont.

Posted on December 15, 2009
I'm glad that Reuters, along with the Guardian, the FT, the Independent, and the Times, has won its case at the European Court of Human Rights over the protection of journalistic sources.

Counterparties

Posted on December 15, 2009
McArdle says homeowners should pay non-recourse loans even if it doesn't make financial sense to do so -- Atlantic

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The art book of the decade

Posted on December 15, 2009
I recently took possession of one of the most beautiful art objects I own. It's a book -- an absolutely stunning one -- and it's just been published by Yale University Press. It's the New Complete Edition of Interaction of Color, the legendary book by Bauhaus master Josef Albers...

Annals of public-private dysfunction, Traffic.com edition

Posted on December 14, 2009
Eric Lipton has an excellent summary of a scathing government audit of a scheme to improve the quality of the information that states and cities have about traffic congestion. (The report isn't meant to be online until later this afternoon, but I downloaded it from the inspector general's website with no problem, and have put it here...

Citi?s expensive TARP exit

Posted on December 14, 2009
Citi's paying big to exit TARP:

Counterparties

Posted on December 14, 2009
Bill Ackman's studio apartment: Asked $950k. Sold for a rather more reasonable $320k -- Curbed

Stuy-Town capitulates

Posted on December 14, 2009
Call it the final death knell for arguably the frothiest deal that the US residential real-estate market has ever seen -- the sale of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper village in Manhattan for $5.4 billion in 2006. The driving force behind the deal was the expectation that the new owners could and would be much more aggressive than the old owners (Met Life) in converting rent-stabilized apartments to market rate...

Private-jet divas miss their meeting with Obama

Posted on December 14, 2009
How incompetent is Citigroup? Incompetent enough that even today, when the bank is announcing a major agreement with the government to pay back its TARP money, neither its chairman nor its CEO was able to turn up to a meeting with the president of the United States of America.

Too-big-to-fail advertisement of the day

Posted on December 13, 2009
Here's a full-page ad I just found in the WSJ; it seems that Bank of America considers $760 billion in lending to be "a good start". Me, I consider it to be "too big to fail" and a clear sign that BofA needs to get smaller, not bigger. I do wonder: is there any point at which BofA would consider itself to be too big? Judging by this ad, it seems the answer is no.

How smaller banks would have helped shrink the CDO market

Posted on December 13, 2009
The WSJ has new details on how banks would pass CDO risk between each other in an improbably long chain:

Drug money and the financial crisis

Posted on December 13, 2009
How much money does the international drugs trade make, and how much of that money helped out the global banking system when liquidity dried up last year? According to the UN, the answer to both questions is "a lot":

The upside of lo-fi

Posted on December 12, 2009
Tyler Cowen is weeping over the fact that younger listeners now prefer the sound of degraded-quality MP3s to that of CDs. Nick Spence has more, pointing out that this is just a 20-years-on reprise of the CD vs vinyl debate; his story ends with this quote.

The happy kind of mortgage default

Posted on December 12, 2009
Many congratulations to Mark Whitehouse for writing an evenhanded and even positive article about walking away for the WSJ. He says that "a growing number of families are concluding that the new American dream home is a rental", and talks about Shana Richey, a schoolteacher who took a $430,000 no-money-down mortgage in 2004 on which she was making payments of $3,700 a month.

?Larry Bergman?, Overstock?s sock-puppet

Posted on December 12, 2009
Here's the friend list of "Larry Bergman", the Overstock-financed sock-puppet who helped to generate the notorious list of friends of those who are critical of crazy Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. Gary Weiss has the details of exactly how that list was generated; although "Bergman" never asked me to be his friend, he friended a few friends of mine, and that's all he needed to see my own friends list.

Don?t ask Taibbi to be Krugman

Posted on December 12, 2009
Andrew Leonard takes the Tim Fernholz approach to Matt Taibbi:

Counterparties

Posted on December 11, 2009
A hugely detailed report on how electric cars can become dominant in the US -- PRTM

Fernholz vs Taibbi

Posted on December 11, 2009
Tim Fernholz has an intemperate attack on Matt Taibbi and his latest article, which is getting a lot of attention in the Twittersphere. It turns out that a lot of journalists don't like Taibbi, and love it when he gets taken down a peg.

Annie Leibovitz is now $30 million in debt

Posted on December 11, 2009
Allen Salkin has some new facts in the continuing saga of Annie Leibovitz and Art Capital Group: the amount that Leibovitz owes Art Capital has now ballooned to $30 million (the original loan, taken out in September 2008, was for $24 million); and the maturity date on the loan has now been extended only to "next summer":

Michael Froman and the revolving door

Posted on December 11, 2009
Michael Froman is one of those behind-the-scenes technocrats who never quite makes it into full public view. But according to Matt Taibbi, he's one of the most egregious examples -- up there with Bob Rubin, literally -- we've yet seen of the way the revolving door works between business and government generally, and between Citigroup and Treasury in particular.

BofA?s dismal mortgage-modification rate

Posted on December 11, 2009
Yet more proof, if proof be needed, of Bank of America's dysfunctionality comes in the latest HAMP report from Treasury. BofA has 1,018,192 loans eligible for modification -- more than twice as many as anybody else; JP Morgan is in second place with 448,815...

Those surprisingly small TCW redemptions

Posted on December 11, 2009
How much has the abrupt departure of star bond fund manager Jeffrey Gundlach cost his former company? Maybe less than you might think: about $2 billion left his fund in the 48 hours after he was fired, but redemptions seem to be slowing down, and that still leaves over $60 billion remaining.

Counterparties

Posted on December 11, 2009
Facebook will soon let its users keep friends lists private -- PC World

When boards are too independent

Posted on December 11, 2009
We all love independent board members of public companies. But can they be too independent?

How buying a home is gambling

Posted on December 11, 2009
Ryan Avent adjudicates the homes-as-investments debate, and comes to a positively Solomonic conclusion:

Is this just the beginning of a depression?

Posted on December 10, 2009
David Rosenberg, the former Merrill Lynch economist now at Gluskin Sheff, has another of his very bearish reports out, and kicks off with this observation:

Britain?s very modest surtax revenues

Posted on December 10, 2009
Andrew Clavell notes something very interesting about the amount of money the UK Treasury expects to raise from its bonus tax:

The behavioral economics of data consumption

Posted on December 10, 2009
I know that when you know how much electricity you're using, you use less of it. But I always thought that was because the more electricity you use, the more you pay. In fact, it might just be a function of the fact that it's being measured and reported back...

Why can?t I hide my list of Facebook friends?

Posted on December 10, 2009
The sleazy anti-shorting crowd at Deep Capture has published a list of my facebook friends, along with those of other critics of the site like Barry Ritholtz, Dan Colarusso, Dave Kansas, David Einhorn, Eric Savitz, Henry Blodget, Jeff Matthews, Joe Nocera, Joe Weisenthal, John Carney, John Hempton, Paul Kedrosky, and Sam Antar.

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