Bailout

When checking fees replace overdraft fees

Posted on July 16, 2010
The NYT has a look at the new sources of revenue that banks are turning to now that the financial reform bill has killed off (or will kill off) many of their old cash cows. From a consumer perspective, the new old thing is fees on checking accounts:

Counterparties

Posted on July 15, 2010
Steinbrenner pays no estate tax; this is "a social scientist?s fondest dream" -- Improbable Research

Congress approves Basel III before it even exists

Posted on July 15, 2010
Assistant Treasury secretary Mike Barr celebrated the passage of the financial reform bill today by phoning me up for a chat. So of course I asked him how much has really been achieved, and how much the really important stuff has been left to the Basel III negotiation process.

Goldman agrees to carry on as usual

Posted on July 15, 2010
My favorite part of the SEC settlement with Goldman Sachs is the bit where Goldman agrees to "a permanent injunction from violations of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933". Well, that's reassuring, knowing that from now on Goldman has promised not to break the law...

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Goldman?s win

Posted on July 15, 2010
Goldman Sachs has come to a settlement with the SEC: it will pay $300 million in fines, and another $250 million in restitution, according to the NYT. There's no indication that any Goldman executives are being forced out: this is a purely financial settlement, and does not even include Goldman admitting any wrongdoing.

Can behavioral economics cause real harm?

Posted on July 15, 2010
George Loewenstein and Peter Ubel are about as expert on behavioral economics as it gets, so it's interesting that they've taken to the op-ed page of the NYT today to urge politicians to spend less time on nudges and more time making substantive policy changes.

The big problem with Europe?s stress tests

Posted on July 15, 2010
Can Europe's bank stress tests do for banks over there what the US tests did on this side of the pond?

Reporting and lobbying in Basel III

Posted on July 15, 2010
The WSJ has its own Basel III update today, which recapitulates most of what we learned yesterday. But there's one new twist -- or new emphasis on an old twist, I'm not sure which. When it comes to proposed liquidity requirements, says the accompanying graphic, "the proposal could cause huge funding shortfalls for banks world-wide"...

How can Benmosche be tamed?

Posted on July 15, 2010
Robert Benmosche is probably the highest-paid public-sector employee in America: his $10.5 million salary means that he takes home Barack Obama's $400,000 annual pay every two weeks. And yes, Obama is his ultimate boss.

Counterparties

Posted on July 14, 2010
Pimco launches GDP-weighted sovereign debt indexes: seems like a very good idea to me -- Reuters

How to build a paywall

Posted on July 14, 2010
If you're going to put a paywall on your website, this is a very sensible way to do it:

How well is Goldman serving its IPO clients?

Posted on July 14, 2010
Bloomberg has placed an interesting headline on Michael Tsang's story about the performance of Goldman's IPOs: "Goldman Can Show SEC Clients Get Best Returns on Its IPOs".

Wealth managers covet hedgies? pay

Posted on July 14, 2010
People, we have a problem: financial advisers aren't being paid enough. But there's a chap named Scott Welch who has a solution: pay them more!

The Basel III jockeying continues

Posted on July 14, 2010
Bloomberg has a good update on Basel III negotiations today. To save you slogging through the whole thing, which is very long, the news is that in the war of banks vs regulators, the banks seem to be winning the battle of how to define capital.

The bizarre wedding of WaPo and Bloomberg

Posted on July 14, 2010
I'm very confused by WaPo's new ?Washington Post with Bloomberg? business section. Bloomberg gets a lot of branding at the top of the page, but at least at launch it had no stories at all above the fold.

Paying executives in debt

Posted on July 13, 2010
Alex Edmans makes a very good point today: it makes a great deal of sense, especially in leveraged companies, to pay CEOs in debt rather than equity. What's more, such compensation is already quite widespread: if a company has promised an executive a defined-benefit pension upon retirement, that's essentially unsecured debt of the company, and can be substa

Counterparties

Posted on July 13, 2010
Merkel's Rules for Bankruptcy: Berlin Club as 'International Guarantor' -- Spiegel

Paywalls encroach on Alphaville

Posted on July 13, 2010
FT Alphaville is spinning off! The fabulous Paul Murphy and Stacy-Marie Ishmael, who have been with Alphaville from the beginning, are now setting up something at even more of an arm's length from the FT itself: "a new digital media service", whatever that might be, called FT Tilt...

U.S. immigration datapoint of the day

Posted on July 13, 2010
For every person with a green card, there's a story of exasperating grappling with an incomprehensible US government bureaucracy. My own story is far too long and boring to go into, but one part of it involved what turns out to be a very common occurrence: my green card was simply lost in the mail, and I was forced to reapply (and pay hundreds of dollars) for a new one on the grounds that it wasn't returned as undeliverable...

Steinbrenner datapoints of the day

Posted on July 13, 2010
What is the financial legacy of George Steinbrenner? Certainly he's built a hugely valuable franchise: he bought the Yankees for $10 million in 1973, and they're now worth just over $1 billion, according to Forbes, with Steinbrenner personally worth slightly more than that, some $1...

Is it possible to hedge tail risk?

Posted on July 13, 2010
Pine River Capital Management has just launched a new hedge fund. You'll like the fee structure: there's no incentive fee at all, which makes for a welcome change from the standard structure where the fund manager takes 20% of the profits. But you might not like the performance: it's designed to lose between 12% and 18% per year playing in the options market.

Are kids getting less creative?

Posted on July 13, 2010
Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman take to Newsweek to break the shocking news that creativity is on the decline:

Counterparties

Posted on July 12, 2010
Volcker "lined up public support for a tough crackdown from other well-known financiers who are roughly his age" -- NYT

Short-seller demonization watch, ProPublica edition

Posted on July 12, 2010
Remember when left-wing inside-the-Beltway pressure-group person Tom Matzzie started demonizing Steve Eisman for being a short seller, without actually engaging with any of his arguments about how for-profit colleges are causing a huge amount of damage and very little benefit? Well, it wasn't long before another inside-the-Beltway pressure group joined in: this time it was Melanie Sloan, of something called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The economics of a college degree

Posted on July 12, 2010
BusinessWeek has a big feature on the value of a college degree, and naturally has <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports

Moving out of equities

Posted on July 12, 2010
The WSJ's Jim Browning has a big story today saying that small investors are "fleeing stocks" and "running for cover". And interestingly, this is not a particularly new phenomenon, and it predates the big crash of 2008:

The minimum wage and productivity

Posted on July 12, 2010
Cardiff Garcia pushes back a little at my contention that raising the minimum wage might help the problems of unemployment, underemployment, and bad employment:

Why Bernanke won?t ease further

Posted on July 12, 2010
Paul Krugman's column today is devoted to telling off the Fed for not being aggressive enough about deflation:

Jingle mail datapoint of the day

Posted on July 09, 2010
David Streitfeld has got his hands on new data from CoreLogic. It's hard to find actual numbers in the article, or any kind of link to the data, so here's the accompanying chart:

Counterparties

Posted on July 09, 2010
George Soros on the crisis and the euro -- NYRB

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