Bailout

Emerging markets aren?t a bubble

Posted on December 04, 2009
Yesterday was the EMTA annual meeting, complete with its venerable and always interesting panel of buy-siders. My favorite is always Hari Hariharan of NWI managment: when asked what his favorite trade is, he never says something simple like "long Brazil"...

Reappointing Bernanke

Posted on December 04, 2009
Ben Bernanke was contrite yesterday, as well he should have been:

Finally, an encouraging jobs report

Posted on December 04, 2009
Today's jobs report is genuinely encouraging, I think. Unemployment is down a little to 10%; employment is "essentially unchanged", in the words of the release; payrolls in prior months were revised upwards; total hours worked went up; wages went up; what's not to like?

Counterparties

Posted on December 04, 2009
Dubai : Dubai World :: USA : Frannie? -- Breakingviews

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Counterparties

Posted on December 04, 2009
Bonuses & ideology -- Dillow

How to get financial reform

Posted on December 04, 2009
TED's Reformist Manifesto is, for all his bluster, a pretty standard wishlist in terms of what kind of regulatory structure you'd set up if you were starting from scratch. It can really be boiled down to one principle: minimize the amount of unregulated financial activity, while also minimizing the amount of regulatory bureaucracy.

How WaMu failed

Posted on December 03, 2009
Amidst the orgy of one-year-on reminiscing in September, I missed Kirsten Grind's 4,000-word story on the failure of WaMu, which is well worth reading.

Opaque bankers

Posted on December 03, 2009
Banks' public disclosures have always been on the opaque side. But now things are worse than ever, according to Nomi Prins, who should know:

Why the plutocrats will return

Posted on December 03, 2009
Is the US government powerless to prevent the return of the plutocrats? Or does it actually, secretly, need the plutocrats to return? Here's Tim Geithner, today:

The return of the plutocrats

Posted on December 03, 2009
It's December, which means it's bonus season, and time for more than the usual amount of bellyaching about pay. Will Bank of America's TARP repayment give it a bit more wiggle room in terms of CEO compensation, thereby broadening the field of potential successors to Ken Lewis? Will General Motors be able to find a CEO when it's state-owned and therefore probably won't be able to pay a typical private-sector salary? Will Goldman Sachs be able to persuade shareholders that its $16 billion bonus pool is reasonable?

Counterparties

Posted on December 03, 2009
The Too Much Joy Royalty Statement -- TMJ

Gone fishing

Posted on October 22, 2009
This is getting a bit surreal: both Clusterstock and Dealbreaker are now phoning up Charlie Gasparino asking for his reaction to my tweets. It's clearly time for me to go on holiday. So I'm off to Spain, back November 4. If you don't expect any blogging between now and then, you won't be disappointed.

Counterparties

Posted on October 22, 2009
The Fed's pay proposals are out: a whole lot of nothing? -- Federal Reserve

Unemployment datapoint of the day

Posted on October 22, 2009
The length of time the average unemployed person has been without a job has been hitting new record highs for a while; it's now managed to pass the 6-month mark. That's much higher than any previous peak in this data series. And I fear that the only way it's likely to come down any time soon is as these people become so demoralized that they take themselves out of the labor force altogether.

Analyzing Galleon?s returns

Posted on October 22, 2009
The Pragmatic Capitalist gets his hands on Galleon's monthly returns, and finds them very suspicious:

Ethics laws can?t work

Posted on October 22, 2009
Richard Painter, who drafted and approved the ethics agreement signed by Hank Paulson when he became treasury secretary, has come to the conclusion that such agreements can never really work as intended:

When failed genius is rewarded

Posted on October 22, 2009
The reaction to the news that John Meriwether is setting up a third hedge fund has been entirely predictable, especially when Sam Jones's story deadpans that "the fund is expected use the same strategy as both LTCM and JWM to make money". (Meriwether's first two funds, of course, were spectacular failures...

Gold-denominated hedge funds

Posted on October 22, 2009
For a while now, hedge funds have been creating share classes denominated in gold. By far the biggest fish in this pool is John Paulson, and as a result he's been buying gold, literally, by the ton. (Indeed, with gold at $1,050 an ounce, and 29,167 ounces per ton, Paulson's $4...

The mortgage-servicing writedowns

Posted on October 22, 2009
Bloomberg's Michael Moore has lots of detail today on the treatment of mortgage servicing rights in banks' earnings reports. No, wait, it's actually interesting! Especially when you look at the numbers involved.

Counterparties

Posted on October 21, 2009
Stop looking at charts! -- Abnormal Returns

Wine: the price of the unknown

Posted on October 21, 2009
How many people, when looking at a wine list, would spend $80 on a timorasso, or $90 for sagrantino? (No, I've never heard of them either.) According to the 28-year-old wine director for Union Square Cafe, as channeled by Ryan Flinn, it's a sizeable number: "drinkers are apt to try something they?ve never heard of if it?s less than $100".

Thursday links are more eclectic than usual

Posted on July 10, 2009
http://bit.ly/4lB2lS I'm sure I'm way late to this, but I just found Rob's Transformers 2 FAQ and boy is it genius Bundanoon, Australia, may be first town in world to have banned bottled water Fischer Black, prescient futurist USA Today with the best story yet on the "overdraft protection" racket If this happens , I'll cancel my print subscription...

The House of Representatives vs automaker bankruptcy

Posted on July 10, 2009
But then along comes the House to make the Senate look great : A majority of House members have signed onto a bill to reverse the closing of 789 Chrysler dealerships and block General Motors Corp. from closing more than 1,300. ... But it's still utterly depressing that Congresspeople are out signing the Automobile Dealer Economic Rights Restoration Act of 2009, which is designed to do an end-run around one of the most successful bankruptcy proceedings in living memory, and which would singlehandedly put the US auto industry onto yet another road to ruin.

What?s the price-quality correlation for bicycles?

Posted on July 09, 2009
But the only people buying $2,500 bikes should be people who can easily afford to pay cash for them: no one should be taking out a loan for that kind of luxury. ... I’ve spent the past day in San Diego (that’s why blogging’s been light) and my mode of transport while I was here was a rented Bianchi Cortina — a very nice bike which retails at $429.

Is McQuade now Pandit?s heir apparent?

Posted on July 09, 2009
Here's his latest press release: Vikram Pandit, Chief Executive Officer of Citigroup, today announced several senior management changes to support the company?s business and strategic priorities and to ensure that proper management is secured to lead these efforts...

Urban underfunding datapoint of the day

Posted on July 09, 2009
Anecdotally (which means that I don't have any empirical data on this, but it feels this way), transportation spending is second only to defense spending when it comes to waste, inefficiency, and a general syndrome of money going to politically-influential districts rather than where it would make the most sense...

Tuesday links underperform

Posted on July 08, 2009
Justin Fox wants contingent stimulus legislation which kicks in if the unemployment rate passes 11% Which did better over the past 15 years: Cash or Stocks ? ... The legal reasoning why CDS are not insurance contracts Jen Chung with a great roundup of the latest developments in the fiasco that is the WTC site "Ten years ago, 55% of The Atlantic's revenues derived from print advertising.

Does Felix have criminal tendencies?

Posted on July 08, 2009
But if I were a prosecutor, I'd have no problem convincing a jury of 12 that a "reasonable" banker should've known that lending money to people of dubious credit risk, with low loan-to-value ratios, in an inflated market would've been a recipe for disaster...

Who gets hurt by toxic mortgages?

Posted on July 08, 2009
Mike at Rortybomb explains just how dangerous mortgages can be, even to people who avoid the toxic ones: If I was a degenerate crackhead who snuck into your neighborhood and mugged you for $50, the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page would want me thrown in jail...

Behavioral economics question of the day

Posted on July 08, 2009
And of course I have a human tendency to want to spend that money now, even though I know a monster credit-card bill is going to be arriving in a few weeks. So the question is: how do I maximize the utility of having use of those funds until the credit-card bill is due, while minimizing the temptation to just go out and spend all that cash?

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