Bailout

Why is HP suing Hurd?

Posted on September 07, 2010
What on earth is the point of Hewlett-Packard suing Mark Hurd? The mutual mudslinging has been decidedly unedifying to date, and now it's certain to get much worse -- and to take place in open court, to boot. With a market capitalization of over $90 billion, suing its former CEO certainly isn't going to move the needle financially...

Are hedge funds abusing bankruptcy?

Posted on September 07, 2010
Mike Spector and Tom McGinty have a big piece in the WSJ looking at the role of hedge funds in bankruptcy negotiations. They're not fans:

How the NYT sees bikes on Broadway

Posted on September 06, 2010
If you wanted proof that New Yorkers think of bicyclists more as pedestrians than as vehicles, all you need to do is look at this graphic in the NYT, which shows how Broadway is used between 59th Street and 17th Street. The lanes are labeled with only two colors: orange and green...

How the US failed Afghanistan, finance edition

Posted on September 06, 2010
Bill Black has a detailed round-up of what we know about Kabul Bank, and where the US went wrong. He's particularly scathing about this quote from Stephen Biddle:

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When short sellers fund journalists

Posted on September 05, 2010
I'm as much of a fan of insidery media navel-gazing as anybody, but Cary Spivak and the AJR have gone way too far with their 3,200-word thumbsucker on the ethics of funding investigative journalism with the proceeds from short-selling.

Payrolls: Flat is the new up

Posted on September 03, 2010
Everybody was so nervous going in to this morning's payrolls report that even though employment fell and unemployment rose, markets are looking extremely exuberant.

Counterparties

Posted on September 03, 2010
Supertax on bankers failed, says Darling -- FT

A unified theory of New York biking

Posted on September 03, 2010
Most bikers in New York have their fair share of road rage. Commuting by bicycle in Manhattan has many things to be said for it, but it's certainly not relaxing. And bicyclists as a group have surprisingly little public support. The question is, why? And I think I've worked out something approaching the Unified Theory of New York Biking: Cyclists get no respect as road users...

The cost of Bernanke?s failure-aversion

Posted on September 03, 2010
John Cassidy has very little patience for Ben Bernanke's latest attempt, in front of the FCIC, to explain how Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail so catastrophically. Bernanke is now saying that Lehman was in such bad shape that it would have failed whether or not the Fed had stepped in to guarantee its debts; like Cassidy, I'm very suspicious of that argument, since a Fed guarantee would have stopped any bank run cold in its tracks.

Will the FCIC report be a whitewash?

Posted on September 03, 2010
Barry Ritholtz was unimpressed with the way that the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was quite soft on Dick Fuld:

Do information asymmetries explain the housing bubble?

Posted on September 02, 2010
Adam Levitin and Susan Wachter have a new paper out which reckons it can explain the entire housing bubble by looking at the supply of private-label mortgage-backed securities in the market, and the information asymmetries embedded in them.

Microfinance datapoints of the day

Posted on September 02, 2010
Here's three takes on microfinance, all from the past month:

Why houses are like dishwashers

Posted on September 02, 2010
A lot of people have been quoting this passage from Chip Case's op-ed on housing as an investment:

When bankers are more dangerous than warlords

Posted on September 02, 2010
Amy Davidson has a good round-up of the tragic bank run at Kabul Bank, which is threatening not only the largest and most important bank in Afghanistan but also what remains of that country's shattered political economy. But you can pretty much learn everything you need to know from reading two sentences from the excellent WaPo report:

Quants merge with humans

Posted on September 02, 2010
Eleanor Laise has found an interesting trend in the world of quant funds: a lot of them are looking much more human, these days.

Counterparties

Posted on September 01, 2010
A peek inside Credit Suisse's marble-walled bike parking room -- Streetsblog

Greece: The bull case

Posted on September 01, 2010
Back in April, I noted with respect to Greece that "the bear case is terrifying, and the bull case is very hard to articulate". So it's extremely useful to have a clearly-articulated paper from the IMF, entitled "Default in Today?s Advanced Economies: Unnecessary, Undesirable, and Unlikely", which puts the bull case much more vividly than I've seen it before.

When plutocrats call for higher taxes

Posted on September 01, 2010
Bob Rubin and Julian Robertson have clearly come to the happy conclusion that, having lived through the first eight months of the year, both them are likely to survive well into 2011 and beyond. But they want to tax their fellow plutocrats who aren't so lucky, by bringing back the estate tax for the remainder of 2010, and even trying to make the tax retroactive to January.

Harrisburg defaults

Posted on September 01, 2010
The Daily Beast kicked off this week's offerings with a slideshow listing "20 Recession-Proof Cities": the ones with high pay and sustained economic growth. I'm not entirely clear on how to link to any given city on the list, but if you click through you'll find Harrisburg, Pennsylvania at #7, the very picture of a hale urban center...

The FX market evolves slowly

Posted on September 01, 2010
I'm puzzled by the tack that the WSJ is taking in describing the latest triennial BIS report on FX trading. (Incidentally, neither the WSJ nor the FT actually bothers to link to it, while the NYT/Dealbook doesn't seem to have covered it at all.)

Counterparties

Posted on August 31, 2010
The number of vacant houses in the U.S. is now roughly 2x the entire Canadian housing stock -- Kedrosky

Equities: The shift from active to passive

Posted on August 31, 2010
Sam Mamudi has found a new way to slice mutual-fund data, and the results are very interesting: the flows aren't just from domestic funds to international funds, as we can see from the monthly ICI data, but also from actively-managed mutual funds to index funds.

Bad idea of the day: copyrighting cocktails

Posted on August 31, 2010
I wonder whether Chantal Martineau stopped to think about her timing, as she wrote her piece for the Atlantic on a movement pushing for the ability to copyright cocktails. Intellectual-property protection isn't getting great press this week, as Paul Allen has turned overnight into one of the world's most gruesome patent trolls.

Can the Fed?s helicopter drop money on Treasury?

Posted on August 31, 2010
Ricardo Caballero has an interesting idea:

Sorkin, Dealbook, and linking out

Posted on August 31, 2010
On Friday, Dan Loeb released his second-quarter investor letter, which was immediately published by Dealbreaker. It's a very political document, kicking off with a full page of quotations from various presidents (and, for some reason, Chinese general Liu Yazhou)...

How increased immigration would help fix the economy

Posted on August 30, 2010
Never mind the stimulus vs austerity debate: here's something that both sides should be able to get behind. It's a simple legislative fix which increases tax revenues without raising taxes; which increases the demand for housing; which increases the economy's productive capacity; and which boosts wages for American workers...

Frannie?s juristic parasites

Posted on August 30, 2010
Everybody knows that the biggest winners from default and foreclosure are always the lawyers. But did you know that default fees on foreclosed properties alone are now being racked up at a rate of $2 billion a year? That's the kind of money which attracts a lot of interest:

Litton, Goldman?s id

Posted on August 30, 2010
The apple, it seems, doesn't fall far from the tree:

Why official statistics are like corporate earnings

Posted on August 30, 2010
Mark Gimein uncovers some statistical legerdemain at the Harlem Village Academies, a pair of middle schools in New York. Let's see how good you are at middle-school math, by seeing whether you can answer this question correctly.

Schwarzenegger?s pension math

Posted on August 30, 2010
Since I'm interested in the value of a guaranteed real income, this sentence jumped out at me from Arnold Schwarzenegger's recent WSJ op-ed:

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