Bailout

Banco Popular changes its ways

Posted on November 23, 2010
It seems I got results! In the wake of my post about Banco Popular's ATM fees on Sunday, Banco Popular has been in touch to say that they're fixing things.

Treasury?s plan to fix the mortgage mess

Posted on November 23, 2010
Michael Barr's departure is a serious loss for Treasury. I spoke to him on Friday; he was in Ann Arbor, where he's returning to law school, and he wanted to take serious exception to my three monkeys post, where I accused Treasury of willfully ignoring the banks' culpability in the mortgage crisis.

Trying to read credit-card agreements

Posted on November 23, 2010
How long will it take to get readable credit-card contracts? My guess is somewhere in 2012, if we're lucky. Right now, although we're moving in the right direction, we're also moving far too slowly:

Expertise mission creep datapoint of the day

Posted on November 23, 2010
Last week, Chris Whalen appeared on Tech Ticker with Henry Blodget; he said, in the accurate if sensationalist words of the Business Insider headline, that CALIFORNIA WILL DEFAULT ON ITS DEBT.

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The law and theater of insider trading

Posted on November 23, 2010
Pull up a chair, folks, the show has already begun, complete with photographs of unidentified "law enforcement officials" in decidedly casual clothes walking cardboard boxes full of "Evidence" out of a Boston hedge fund's offices.

Counterparties

Posted on November 23, 2010
Jesse Green's profile of Spiderman and Julie Taymor. I've been walking by the theater every day, now I want to go in! -- NY Mag

China expert of the day, Benjamin Wey edition

Posted on November 23, 2010
In September, one Benjamin Wey, calling himself "Chinese American Financial Expert Foremost Expert On Chinese Business in U.S.", put out a press release announcing that he'd engaged a PR company. And it wasn't just any old PR company: it was 5WPR. Go on, look them up.

Counterparties

Posted on November 22, 2010
Is investing in small business a better bet than buying stocks? -- Locklin

The underwhelming Irish bailout

Posted on November 22, 2010
Color me underwhelmed by the Irish bailout.

Why Wall Street won?t get shrunk

Posted on November 22, 2010
This week's New Yorker features 8,000 words from John Cassidy on how financiers extract rents from the real economy rather than adding real value.

CDS chart of the day, Portugal edition

Posted on November 22, 2010
Many thanks to my colleague Eric Burroughs for sending over this chart, showing how Portugal's CDS curve has evolved over the course of this year:

The user-hostile FT

Posted on November 22, 2010
John Gruber wrote the definitive article about "Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks", back in May.

WSJ vs PIN

Posted on November 22, 2010
Gartner's Avivah Litan knows what she's talking about when it comes to the relative safety of signature debit and PIN-based transactions.

How the FBI puts researchers out of business

Posted on November 22, 2010
Remember the rather wonderfully worded email sent out to clients by John Kinnucan of Broadband Research in October?

Egregious bank fee of the day, Banco Popular edition

Posted on November 21, 2010
Commenter Engels has a bank account at Banco Popular. Checking his account online he found these weird charges:

Counterparties

Posted on November 19, 2010
Dan Primack owns the Rattner story. His response to Rattner's statement -- Fortune

Can legal due process move online?

Posted on November 19, 2010
Sam Glover has a great pair of blog entries up about due process in class-action lawsuits.

Should Ireland default and devalue?

Posted on November 19, 2010
Mohamed El-Erian weighs in on Ireland today, and is blunt.

Can you patent financial innovations?

Posted on November 19, 2010
Time's Stephen Gandel says that Loan Value Group's Responsible Homeowner Reward program is one of "the 50 best inventions of 2010":

Rating munis

Posted on November 19, 2010
When Meredith Whitney released her magnum opus on America's municipalities in September, there was lots of grumbling about why an expert in financial stocks should be listened to on the subject of municipal bonds.

Counterparties

Posted on November 18, 2010
Peter Eavis has an elegant solution to the Ireland crisis, and he even manages to squeeze it into less than 140 characters -- Twitter

The lessons of Andhra Pradesh

Posted on November 18, 2010
Are we ever going to get a good article on the hugely important microcredit crisis in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh?

The three monkeys of mortgage bonds

Posted on November 18, 2010
Have you forgotten about the mortgage-bond scandal yet?

Book pricing datapoints of the day

Posted on November 18, 2010
When a big new book comes out, the publisher has two choices. It can allow Amazon to sell the Kindle edition at a much lower price than the hardback, increasing the number of copies sold but possibly cannibalizing hardback sales.

Does the SEC have teeth after all?

Posted on November 18, 2010
The SEC is all over the news today. It's investigating Citigroup! It's examining Charles Schwab, over the YieldPlus fiasco which we thought was settled but wasn't! And, of course, in conjunction with Andrew Cuomo, it's coming down on Steve Rattner like a ton of bricks:

Counterparties

Posted on November 17, 2010
What Joe Nocera has in common with Matt Taibbi: "Individually, I honestly think the biggest villain is Alan Greenspan" -- NYMag

How Tina Brown is like quantitative easing

Posted on November 17, 2010
Nick Summers has found one reason for Tina Brown to shutter Newsweek.com:

Twitter datapoint of the day

Posted on November 17, 2010
I work for a global information company which makes billions of dollars a year selling valuable data to banks, hedge funds, and other people in the financial markets, often at very high prices: $2,000 a month or even more.

The story of Deutsche Bank?s Las Vegas casino

Posted on November 17, 2010
Alexandra Berzon has an enjoyable piece in today's WSJ about the Cosmpolitan, the new $4 billion casino, fully paid for by Deutsche Bank, which is opening up in Las Vegas next month.

Felix TV: The fiscal solution

Posted on November 17, 2010
We've seen the problem, and we've seen why quantitative easing doesn't seem to be much of a solution. So what is the solution? Fiscal policy, of course. But don't hold your breath.

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