Bailout

When anonymous sources disappear entirely

Posted on June 21, 2009
By contrast, here's the first paragraph of the WSJ story: Steve Jobs, who has been on medical leave from Apple Inc. since January to treat an undisclosed medical condition, received a liver transplant in Tennessee about two months ago. ... It'll be interesting to see whether the WSJ goes down this road more often in future -- and what readers are meant to make of the distinction between stories which are just asserted, on the one hand, and stories which are sourced to "people familiar with the matter", on the other.

Wine datapoint of the day

Posted on June 20, 2009
I haven't been able to track down the figures -- trade.gov is down all weekend for "scheduled maintenance" -- but this is a huge development, I think, especially since French wines, for my money, have never been better value. ... But in any case, at the margin reduced demand for French wine means cheaper French wine, which is surely a good thing, while increased demand for Argentine wine doesn't seem to have driven up the price of Malbec particularly, and good Malbec is becoming much easier to find, to boot.

Crap marketing campaign of the day, Merrill Lynch edition

Posted on June 19, 2009
This is the new branding campaign for Merrill Lynch, and it’s stunningly crap. First an old-fashioned fountain pen flies in from the right, to be met by a mirroring BofA logo (the Merrill logo seems to have been ditched) coming in from the left...

Thomas Kinkade: Bad, not evil

Posted on June 19, 2009
The people who ran Kinkade stores are upset at him, because he acted a bit like Chrysler towards dealers it ended up closing: Kinkade forced the dealers to buy expensive inventory which simply didn't sell, and refused to accept returns unless they were accompanied by orders for three times as much art as was being returned...

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Too big to rescue

Posted on June 19, 2009
Paul Krugman is surely right about this: I think of the pursuit of a world in which everyone is small enough to fail as the pursuit of a golden age that never was. ... When I say that banks' balance sheets should be capped at $300 billion, I'm not for a minute saying that $300 billion is small enough to fail; I'm just saying that such banks are small enough to rescue.

Reverse converts and Vincent Fernando?s straw man

Posted on June 19, 2009
Bond investors, as a rule, are always better off in bond funds than they are picking and choosing their own bond portfolio, not least because the trading costs for bonds, if you take account of the enormous bid-offer spreads shown to retail investors, are a good order of magnitude bigger than they are for stocks...

What?s Citi doing to Pandit?

Posted on June 19, 2009
Breakingviews today has a very odd column saying, essentially, that Vikram Pandit should keep his job despite the fact that since he took over at Citigroup, he's made a large number of serious mistakes and has done almost nothing right. The thing which most struck me about the column, however, was the photo which accompanies it, of Pandit sporting a double chin of Larry Summers proportions.

Friday links take leave of their senses

Posted on June 19, 2009
If you want a job with the City of Bozeman, you'll need to fork over your Facebook and Google passwords . ... Commencement speech lies Banks should pay for their own bailouts Newspapers shooting themselves in the foot, part 972: Now they want to charge people who link to them .

Thursday links stick their head in the sand

Posted on June 18, 2009
Jonah Lehrer on why investors should ignore the markets and the financial press Paul Smalera comprehensively demolishes the idea that micropayments might ever save Time Inc Larry Summers is not in touch with his uncle , Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson...

Unemployment datapoint of the day

Posted on June 18, 2009
Brad DeLong reminds us, in case we've forgotten, how much worse things are now than we feared they would be last December: Does this mean the recovery plan has failed? Or that it was even more necessary than we thought at the time?

How ETF investors fare

Posted on June 18, 2009
John Bogle's mutual fund vs ETF analysis has now appeared , and it seems I was right : Bogle makes no attempt whatsoever to distinguish between buy-and-hold ETF investors, on the one hand, and ETF noise traders, on the other. ... That said, Bogle's analysis is pretty interesting -- especially when he says that the average investor in Vanguard's S&P 500 mutual fund actually outperforms the fund itself by 2...

Dean Starkman loves Gretchen Morgenson

Posted on June 18, 2009
Dean Starkman has a 4,148-word love letter to Gretchen Morgenson in The Nation; it's far from clear that his feelings are reciprocated, despite the fact that he calls her "the most important financial journalist of her generation", and dismisses her critics as trying to start "arguments about wallpaper design in a burning house"...

Rant of the day: Taibbi on Blankfein

Posted on June 18, 2009
It went like this: While we regret that we participated in the market euphoria and failed to raise a responsible voice, we are proud of the way our firm managed the risk it assumed on behalf of our client before and during the financial crisis. ....

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