Bailout

Prop trading? What prop trading?

Posted on July 23, 2010
Matt Cameron picks up on an interesting tidbit from the most recent Goldman Sachs earnings call:

Counterparties

Posted on July 22, 2010
Chittum on Kneale -- CJR

FT Alphaville?s predictive powers

Posted on July 22, 2010
As Paul Murphy takes his leave of Alphaville, news arrives that his baby has predictive powers:

The SEC is harsher on Dell than on Blankfein

Posted on July 22, 2010
Dell's $100 million settlement with the SEC is notable for the fact that Michael Dell is personally being fined as well:

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How will Mary Schapiro fix the ratings-agency mess?

Posted on July 22, 2010
The biggest unintended consequences of Dodd-Frank to date is the fact that the market in asset-backed securities seems to be closed, with Ford pulling a deal which was going to be more than $1 billion.

How Jamie Dimon sees himself

Posted on July 22, 2010
Well done to Jessica Pressler for picking up on this astonishing photo from the house that Jamie Dimon is still trying to sell in Chicago; it's now listed at $9.5 million, down from an original asking price of $13.5 million. That's less than $1.2 million per bedroom: a bargain!

Uncle Sam spends $3.5 billion buying a subprime lender

Posted on July 22, 2010
Quite aside from the costs of rescuing GM itself, the US government spent a whopping $17.2 billion bailing out GM's subprime lender, GMAC. It's never going to get repaid in full: at the moment estimates of total losses on that deal are running at about the $6 billion mark...

Don?t worry yet about credit card fees

Posted on July 22, 2010
It stands to reason that, just as overdraft fees are likely to be replaced with checking fees, something similar is going to happen with credit cards. But Ylan Mui overstretches, today, in her story saying that it's already happening:

Counterparties

Posted on July 21, 2010
How internet access is a license to print money for Time Warner Cable -- Ars Technica

Auto dealers vs Treasury, part 322

Posted on July 21, 2010
Jim Surowiecki 3didn't even scratch the surface when it comes to the power of auto dealers in general, and Big Three auto dealers in particular. They're grossly inefficient, as this chart from Monday's SIGTARP report on them shows.

Kneale, craven

Posted on July 21, 2010
You won't find many defenders of Dennis Kneale's philosophy of journalism on Twitter or even among his colleagues in the CNBC studio.

Summer book giveaway

Posted on July 21, 2010
Some of you might remember my holiday book giveaway from last December, which was a great success. So I'm taking advantage of the presence here in the office of Daniel Lippman, who is going to help distribute the books that have accumulated around my desk since then...

Linkrot at the AP

Posted on July 21, 2010
Tom Laskawy found something rather ominous today: whenever he looked for an AP article more than 30 days old, it had disappeared!

Loan-modification failure of the day

Posted on July 21, 2010
As of today, Treasury has started releasing a new set of datapoints with respect to its Making Home Affordable program. Look at page 5 of the monthly report on how the program is doing, and you'll see a page detailing what they call the "disposition path" of the 194,056 trial mortgages which have been cancelled through April...

Counterparties

Posted on July 20, 2010
Mexican savings accounts have negative real interest rates. Affordable!-- Center for Financial Inclusion

Will wine ever be democratic?

Posted on July 20, 2010
My latest wine column is up, and because I couldn't do it there, I'd like to send out a big thank-you to Mike Veseth, whose post I drew liberally from both for quotes from Thomas Pinney and for its central idea.

Unemployment chart of the day

Posted on July 20, 2010
Chart of the day comes from Derek Thompson:

Banking: Can small beat big?

Posted on July 20, 2010
Whither small banks? Matt Goldstein has a big story today about the large number of private-equity shops and other financial investor chomping at the bit to acquire small banks -- and the way in which they're so far being rebuffed by the FDIC and other regulators.

Goldman Sachs starts looking human

Posted on July 20, 2010
Steve Eder reports on Goldman's earnings:

Elizabeth Warren?s nomination

Posted on July 20, 2010
The question of who will be Barack Obama's nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has now been clearly framed: either it's going to be Elizabeth Warren, or it isn't. That's how Damian Paletta sees it, that's how Simon Johnson sees it, and that's certainly how the Progressive Change Committee sees it: they're up to 138,485 people and counting on their petition to put Warren in charge.

Counterparties

Posted on July 19, 2010
The Limits Of Indexing: "don?t assume that your index tracker is going to track the index", especially in EM -- Index Universe

CNBC embarrasses itself on counterfeiting

Posted on July 19, 2010
The people at CNBC never got back to me when I asked to talk to them about their counterfeiting documentary, and now that I've seen the trailer, I can see why: it gobbles uncritically all of the baseless statistics that I've been railing against since 2004.

When online editors spew jargon

Posted on July 19, 2010
The history of the news business has no shortage of legendary larger-than-life straight-talkers with vision and drive and a bottle of whiskey in their desk drawer. The top editorial staff at newspapers, magazines, and television news shows might be well versed in the dark arts of office politics, but they nearly always make sure that their public face is a simple and often friendly one...

The unique Paul Volcker

Posted on July 19, 2010
I like John Cassidy's piece on Paul Volcker: it gives a great sense of how he's managed to use his independence to great and important effect.

Good news from Hungary

Posted on July 19, 2010
Remember the storm-in-a-teacup Hungary crisis, back in June? Global markets all tumbled on fears about Hungarian austerity, of all things. It was all a bit weird for two reasons: firstly, the crisis was caused by remarks from a brand-new and wholly inexperienced incoming government, which had yet to find its legs or implement any policies at all...

Counterparties

Posted on July 16, 2010
Goldman had $27 billion in cash and short-term securities on March 31 -- Footnoted

Sell-side snafu of the day, JP Morgan edition

Posted on July 16, 2010
This is the stock chart for ATP Oil and Gas over the past five days: it plunged at the open on Tuesday, and then soared at the close today. And it's all because of Joseph Allman, the analyst for ATP at JP Morgan

Fraud settlement datapoints of the day

Posted on July 16, 2010
Announcing the SEC settlement with Goldman Sachs yesterday, Robert Khuzami started waxing hyperbolic:

The value of a strong brand, Apple edition

Posted on July 16, 2010
Steve Jobs did a great job at his press conference today, in classic Stevenote style. He showed that the "death grip" problem is endemic to the entire smartphone space, rather than being something unique to the iPhone 4. He talked a lot about how most of his customers love the phone, and how its return rates are a fraction of the equivalent number on the iPhone 3GS...

Basel III: The incomplete capital buffer proposal

Posted on July 16, 2010
The Basel Committee has started producing pretty detailed documents: today it released what it calls a "a fully fleshed out countercyclical capital buffer proposal".

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