Bailout

Counterparties

Posted on December 17, 2010
The Books Ngram Viewer is amazing, see eg this or this -- Google Labs

The Chevron poll

Posted on December 17, 2010
WaPo's Paul Farhi has the story today of PFC Opinion Research, which is offering journalists $250 to talk on the phone for 25 minutes about their opinions of the oil and gas industry. News reporters might be supposed to keep their opinions out of their copy, but Farhi makes it very clear where he's coming from on this front:

Rent-vs-buy calculation of the day, Nouriel Roubini edition

Posted on December 17, 2010
Back in May, Nouriel Roubini held his book party at DBGB. He obviously likes the location, since in September he paid $5.5 million for the triplex penthouse upstairs. (EV Grieve has the photos of what is now the most expensive apartment ever sold in the East Village...

What did hedge funds know about the Picower negotiations?

Posted on December 17, 2010
Is there such a thing as insider trading in things which aren't remotely securities? On Monday, the NYT had a report headlined "Speculators Are Eager to Bet on Madoff Claims", saying that hedge funds were bidding somewhere around 30 cents on the dollar...

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Counterparties

Posted on December 16, 2010
The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention -- Salon

Why the FCIC might release its data

Posted on December 16, 2010
Keith Hennessey, one of the four Republican commissioners on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, has helpfully provided a copy of the Financial Crisis Primer the commissioners sent to the President and Congress.

Things for which we owe Larry Summers some gratitude

Posted on December 16, 2010
I did enjoy reading John Cassidy on Larry Summers:

The cost of bailing out Frannie

Posted on December 16, 2010
Let's say I buy a $3,000 pair of handmade shoes but don't have that kind of cash to hand, so I put them on my credit card.

The Fed?s bold move on debit interchange

Posted on December 16, 2010
The Fed's swipe-fee proposals are out, and the market action in Visa and Mastercard -- both of them are down more than 10% today -- tells you everything you need to know.

Rating structured bonds is impossible

Posted on December 16, 2010
Re-remics are a regulatory arbitrage with negative economic value -- you take a bunch of bonds , and then spend lots of money on bankers and lawyers and ratings agencies in order to transform them into other bonds.

Veblen good of the day, Julie Mehretu edition

Posted on December 16, 2010
Do finance types pay millions of dollars for art because of how good it is -- or do they pay millions of dollars for art precisely because it costs millions of dollars? If there was any doubt before, you only need to listen to Lloyd Blankfein, talking about the art in his lobby:

Europe goes mad over art

Posted on December 16, 2010
Georgina Adam has the gobsmacking story, for the Art Newspaper: according to the European Commission, works by Dan Flavin and Bill Viola are not art.

How to monetize a Broadway show

Posted on December 15, 2010
Catherine Rampell has an interesting post today on the economics of Spider-Man, the most expensive musical that Broadway has ever seen.

$190,000 a year is rich

Posted on December 15, 2010
I just started reading Erika Olson's Zero-Sum Game, her account of the CBOT-CME merger. Her introduction of the CBOT's CEO, Bernie Dan, includes this passage about his college days:

The WSJ mistrusts companies which pay down debt

Posted on December 15, 2010
Sharon Terlep's story on GM trying to pay down its debt is a great indicator of how the leverage-is-good meme simply refuses to die, even after the financial crisis.

The FCIC falls apart

Posted on December 15, 2010
Shahien Nasiripour reports this morning that the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has, to all intents and purposes, fallen apart.

Counterparties

Posted on December 15, 2010
"One senior defense official questioned the wisdom of blocking the newspaper sites" -- WSJ

Immoral bankers

Posted on December 14, 2010
The UK's Institutional Investor Council has issued a blistering report on the excessive fees that investment banks charge companies to issue new shares -- fees which one issuer are "usually immoral".

Don?t buy that internet company

Posted on December 14, 2010
"The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed," says Jim Surowiecki in this week's New Yorker.

Summers departs

Posted on December 14, 2010
I enjoyed Dana Milbank's farewell to Larry Summers today.

Why passwords are insecure

Posted on December 14, 2010
There's been a lot of talk over the past couple of days, since Gawker was hacked, about how embarrassingly insecure its users' passwords were.

Secondary market datapoints of the day

Posted on December 14, 2010
Many thanks to Peter Lattman and Diana Henriques for answering my question from last week.

Counterparties

Posted on December 14, 2010
Here come the '99ers -- CR

Wall Street bonus datapoint of the day

Posted on December 13, 2010
In a Bloomberg poll, 88% of respondents said that Wall Street bonuses should either be banned outright or taxed at 50%. Just 7% said they should remain an incentive:

Betterment: Overpriced simplicity

Posted on December 13, 2010
Sean Park is so excited about Betterment that he bought a stake in the company:

Is Obama endangering Social Security?

Posted on December 13, 2010
There's a meme doing the rounds on the left, that giving employees a 2% break on their Social Security contributions for a year is, in Ryan Grim's words, "a hidden threat to Social Security".

Counterparties

Posted on December 13, 2010
Apple and Google likely in the bidding for Nortel's patents, which could fetch $1 billion -- Reuters

Counterparties

Posted on November 24, 2010
The utterly horrifying story of Imogene Hall, defrauded out of her home in the dreadful Florida courts -- Miami Herald

Don Chu is small fry

Posted on November 24, 2010
If you read the complaint.pdf in the Don Chu case, a couple of things jump out at you. One is how modestly Chu was paid, for someone conspiring with hedge funds to reap a fortune from inside information:

Is Ireland?s problem a Basel problem?

Posted on November 24, 2010
Does the Ireland crisis bespeak a major weakness in the Basel capital-adequacy regime? Simon Nixon thinks so: the fact that investors won't lend to Bank of Ireland, he says, "highlights a major weakness of the Basel capital rules that European banks operate under".

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