Bailout

Why do minimum parking requirements still exist?

Posted on June 24, 2010
Tom Vanderbilt has a great piece in Slate on the high cost of free parking:

Summers clams up

Posted on June 24, 2010
Caren Bohan has a 3,500-word profile of Larry Summers, in which she gets a lot of Washington insiders to talk about him on the record. The one person who doesn't do much in the way of talking is Summers himself, who gets quoted all of three times; none of the quotes contains anything substantive...

What?s with older Americans and credit card debt?

Posted on June 24, 2010
Lending Club just commissioned a new debt survey from Harris, which has some interesting results:

Fannie Mae demonizes the victims of the housing bust

Posted on June 24, 2010
By encouraging homeowners to modify their loans without reducing the amount they owe or having any chance of having any equity in their homes in the foreseeable future, Fannie is kicking the can not very far down the road, and ensuring that default and foreclosure will be a nationwide problem for years to come...

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Counterparties

Posted on June 23, 2010
Understanding German fiscal policy -- MR

BP: Now more evil than Goldman Sachs

Posted on June 23, 2010
There will be rejoicing in the corridors of Goldman Sachs tonight: BP has finally overtaken it in the most-loathed company stakes! Yes, Goldman is still plumbing depths rarely seen in the modern era. But BP, even after putting aside $20 billion and grovelling to the president, continues to implode: it's now hit a level of -47...

When the SEC subpoenas journalists? sources

Posted on June 23, 2010
Henry Blodget, like all other right-thinking individuals, is appalled at the SEC recapitulating its David Einhorn let's-shoot-the-messenger errors with its subpoena of 37,000 documents from Sam Antar. But at the same time, Blodget doesn't seem concerned about the way in which the SEC has included emails to journalists among the documents it's asking for:

Income tax loophole of the day

Posted on June 23, 2010
Essentially, when the pipelines were owned by companies, the companies paid tax on their profits -- which was accounted for in the federally-mandated revenue rates -- and then the post-tax profits of the companies became taxable income for the companies' owners, just like any other dividend income...

Goldman presses the flesh

Posted on June 23, 2010
Goldman Sachs was historically a bit like Bernie Madoff: both of them were successful partly because they were very good at playing hard to get. They both had sterling reputations, and both of them were wrapped in a certain amount of mystery. Things are different now, and as Matt Goldstein and Steve Eder report, Goldman is opening itself up to clients in an unprecedented manner, in the wake of the SEC suit against it...

Ireland?s dastardly new savings product

Posted on June 23, 2010
Free checking, for instance, becomes extremely expensive checking when you overdraw your account; and people regularly buy items on their credit card intending to pay the statement off in full, but then fail to do so, incurring substantial interest payments not only on that one item but on everything else they bought that month as well...

Counterparties

Posted on June 22, 2010
Why has the SEC subpoenaed Sam Antar's emails to journalists? And his recent divorce records? -- Portfolio

Ken Feinberg?s other job

Posted on June 22, 2010
If anybody other than Ken Feinberg were in charge, this would worry me greatly:

Competition in payments

Posted on June 22, 2010
Adam Ozimek reckons that we need more competition in the payments space, and that interchange regulation is going to impede progress towards that goal:

Even the Fed can?t get credit-card language right

Posted on June 22, 2010
CardHub.com has an interesting survey of the literature surrounding penalty interest rates on credit cards. Many of the biggest card issuers rank as "poor", on the quality and transparency of their disclosures, although Wells Fargo stands out as being particularly good.

The new wave of bank taxes

Posted on June 22, 2010
Maybe this was inevitable: the UK has moved from its clever one-off supertax on bankers' bonuses to a much more permanent -- and indeed rising -- tax on bank balance sheets:

The indignities of an investment banker in China

Posted on June 22, 2010
Whenever the subject of banker pay comes up, there's always an apologist somewhere talking about how very hard these people work -- nights, weekends, everything! Which is why I had a good giggle this morning on reading Michael Flaherty's story about the indignities facing the poor bankers working on the AgBank IPO in China: the data room is underground! And they might have to miss World Cup matches!

Counterparties

Posted on June 21, 2010
Renminbi ruminations: a great roundup -- Alphaville

Why companies will stick with Twitter

Posted on June 21, 2010
I was offline for much of Friday for various reasons, with the World Cup not even being the main one. Instead, I was across the street from Reuters, at the Nasdaq, sitting on one panel and giving a keynote speech to a group of financial PR professionals interested in social media in general, and Twitter in particular.

The interchange win

Posted on June 21, 2010
It looks like interchange-fee regulation has made it through! That's great news, and I'm not particularly concerned about the compromises that Dick Durbin made. The Fed can now consider fraud costs as well as transaction costs in setting the level of interchange fees -- that's OK, although it'll probably just push further down the road the day when the US will finally embrace the low-fraud EMV standard.

Time?s big new paywall

Posted on June 21, 2010
Is this new? Following a link from AR today, I ran straight into a Time Magazine paywall:

Politics of subprime datapoint of the day

Posted on June 21, 2010
Atif Mian, Amir Sufi, and Francesco Trebbi report, in a new paper:

What would JP Morgan do with Arminio Fraga?

Posted on June 21, 2010
Citigroup famously paid $800 million for a young and doomed hedge fund, Old Lane, just so that it could hire its founder, Vikram Pandit. No one thinks that decision was a good one, in hindsight. But JP Morgan is setting its sights rather higher, looking to buy Gávea Investimentos, along with (one presumes) its founder, Arminio Fraga.

Why sell-side analysts are wrong

Posted on June 21, 2010
Aaron Pressman has a good report on the sell-side failure to perceive the risks surrounding BP in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Why was Wall Street so very bullish on the stock even as it was being pummeled in the markets?

How to avoid a fiscal panic

Posted on June 21, 2010
Edmund Andrews adjudicates duelling op-eds by Paul Krugman and Alan Greenspan on the subject of fiscal policy, and although he purports to come down somewhere in the middle, by the time he's finished his prescriptions end up sounding very much like those of Krugman.

Are foreclosures racist?

Posted on June 18, 2010
If you're a high-income Latino with a mortgage, you're almost twice as likely to be facing foreclosure than a high-income non-Hispanic white person. And in general, the foreclosure crisis is hitting blacks and Latinos much harder than it is whites, according to a startling new report from the Center for Responsible Lending.

Counterparties

Posted on June 18, 2010
HuffPost buys Adaptive Semantics to keep up with 100,000 comments a day -- TechCrunch

CEO succession planning: broken

Posted on June 17, 2010
If you make it to CEO of a major public company, chances are you're pretty competitive. And if you're that competitive, chances are you're not going to stop being competitive just because you're CEO. And if you're CEO, there's a very good chance that you're chairman of the board as well...

The FT talks up its paywalled blog

Posted on June 17, 2010
Robert Shrimsley, managing editor of FT.com, gave an interesting quote to Laura Oliver about the FT's Money Supply blog moving behind the paywall:

Counterparties

Posted on June 17, 2010
Yahoo Finance hiring "a small team of professional bloggers" -- Yahoo

Elliott Associates goes to Albany, again

Posted on June 17, 2010
Back in the late 1990s, Elliott Associates was embroiled in litigation with Peru. And it went to extreme lengths to try to collect as much money from the Latin country as it possibly could:

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