Bailout

Counterparties

Posted on June 03, 2010
Roddy Boyd's new home -- The Financial Investigator

McArdle?s objections to congestion pricing

Posted on June 03, 2010
Many thanks to Megan McArdle for giving me something to push back against with respect to congestion pricing. Megan, like me, favors congestion pricing, but she does see some problems with it.

Why AT&T is evil to have multiple data plans

Posted on June 03, 2010
On the London Underground, you don't need to decide whether it makes more sense to buy an individual ticket or to buy a daily or a weekly or a monthly pass. With the Oyster card, you just tap in and tap out around the system, and it charges you whatever's cheapest...

Continuing risks in the housing market

Posted on June 03, 2010
Wcw explains the economics of the housing bubble, in a smart comment:

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Buffett?s PR disaster

Posted on June 03, 2010
From a PR point of view -- and Warren Buffett cares deeply about his public image -- yesterday was arguably the single worst day of Buffett's life. He was dragged against his will -- with a subpoena, no less -- in front of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which grilled him on whether, as Moody's largest shareholder, he took any responsibility at all for the disaster that happened there...

Breaking Media?s full RSS returns

Posted on June 03, 2010
The Breaking Media RSS Experiment, which I wrote about here in April, is over. And the winner is… full RSS! Here’s Breaking Media CEO Jonah Bloom: The whole idea of trying to force people into certain media consumption habits seems futile in an era when technology has enabled people to consume whatever they want, however they want [...

Counterparties

Posted on June 02, 2010
Cramer, post-spill, recommends BP at $50, and then, a week later, at $49 -- CNBC, ibid

Why links belong in text

Posted on June 02, 2010
A couple of people want to know what I think about the Nick Carr essay doing the rounds of the internet, where he advocates relegating links to the bottom of blog entries.

How soon might Greece default?

Posted on June 02, 2010
I spent most of this afternoon attending a fascinating discussion looking at Greece from the perspective of emerging-market veterans who are used to sovereign debt default and restructurings. There was quite a lot of consensus on the panel, and not in a good way: everybody agreed that the bailout of Greece was only postponing the inevitable, and many people reckoned that it wasn't going to postpone it very long: one pair of hedge fund managers in the audience reckoned that it would last about six months before the default finally happens.

The congestion pricing debate

Posted on June 02, 2010
I recorded a lively sit-down discussion today with Charles Komanoff, the subject of my Wired article; Reihan Salam; Skymeter CEO Kamal Hassan; and Corey Bearak of Keep NYC Free.

Why is the Fed so bank-friendly on credit cards?

Posted on June 02, 2010
Shahien Nasiripour has found an interesting report from the Federal Reserve, looking at whether the credit-card rules which apply to individuals should apply to small businesses as well. The Fed, weirdly, fudges the question, but it's clear to me that small businesses deserve all the same protections that individuals get.

The upside of mortgage default

Posted on June 02, 2010
I talked about "Jingle Mail 2.0" on Tech Ticker this morning, and Henry Blodget made the good point that freeing up mortgage payments for small-business operating expenses or consumer goods does provide a short-term boost to the economy -- at the expense, of course, of banks' balance sheets.

Counterparties

Posted on June 01, 2010
If financial journalism failed up to and during the crisis, things like this are a large part of the reason why -- Talking Biz News

Why oppose the congestion charge?

Posted on June 01, 2010
I'm having quite a lot of difficulty coming up with someone to take the anti-congestion-pricing stance in the debate that I'm taping at Reuters in Times Square tomorrow. Policy wonks from left to right seem to like the idea with remarkable unanimity, at least in theory if not in the exact form that any given proposal might take...

Buying BP

Posted on June 01, 2010
Did the markets really think the top kill was going to work? Evidently so -- BP shares fell 15% today, to $36.52. But before we declare this the end of BP, let's put this in perspective: the shares traded as low as $34.06 in March 2009. And over the last three years, BP is down 46%, compared to 30% for the S&P 500 (and Exxon Mobil) and 93% for Citigroup...

Jingle mail and the mortgage crisis

Posted on June 01, 2010
David Streitfeld has a great NYT piece on the way in which jingle mail, or strategic default, seems to be reaching its logical conclusion. Right now, about 24% of all mortgaged properties are underwater. And if you're being foreclosed upon now, you probably defaulted 438 days ago...

The two-pronged Greece bailout

Posted on June 01, 2010
When the Greece crisis first erupted, the choice facing European policymakers was clear. Should they bail out Greece, giving it all the money it needs to pay its debts as they come due, or should they let the Greek chips fall as they may, and then bail out their national banks instead to the degree those banks lost money on their Greek bonds? Some kind of bailout was inevitable; the only question was whether it would be a sovereign bailout or a bank bailout...

Congestion charging: The options

Posted on June 01, 2010
Ryan Avent weighs in on my Wired article about congestion pricing with a question I'm going to be putting to some experts on the subject tomorrow. I've invited Reihan Salam, John Avlon, and Skymeter CEO Kamal Hassan to chat with Charles Komanoff in the swanky Reuters TV studio overlooking Times Square; the video should be up online later this week.

Counterparties

Posted on May 28, 2010
Overstock.com's CEO Unloads Shares While SEC Fiddles -- Sam Antar

Is there any reason to subsidize construction loans?

Posted on May 28, 2010
Is Brad Miller -- one of the most financially-sophisticated Congressmen in the House -- really sponsoring a bill in which Treasury would provide loan guarantees for homebuilders? Calculated Risk responds as one might imagine:

Why we shouldn?t subsidize construction

Posted on May 28, 2010
I've received some great feedback on my post on subsidizing construction loans, especially from Tom Lindmark, who points out that if you want a short-term jobs boost which doesn't increase US imports very much, then construction is a great area to subsidize...

The Bancrofts? final WSJ capitulation

Posted on May 28, 2010
Remember the war over whether or not Rupert Murdoch would be able to buy the WSJ from the Bancroft family? Sarah Ellison has written the definitive account of the whole story, and now follows up with a couple of startling quotes from the Bancrofts who opposed the sale:

Marking bank loans to market

Posted on May 28, 2010
Should banks mark their loans to market? The issue -- which flared up briefly at the height of the financial crisis, when everybody was wondering whether many of America's largest banks were insolvent -- is back in the headlines, thanks to FASB's proposed rule change, which Tracy Alloway calls "mark-to-mayhem".

The problems with university endowments

Posted on May 28, 2010
If you fancy some iPad reading for the Memorial Day weekend, you could do a lot worse than to download this Tellus paper into GoodReader or similar. It's titled "Educational Endowments and the Financial Crisis: Social Costs and Systemic Risks in the Shadow Banking System; the lead author, who writes very clearly and readably, is Joshua Humphreys.

Counterparties

Posted on May 27, 2010
Euro Crisis Dashboard -- Inflexionary

The operations of Annie Leibovitz?s sophisticated advisor

Posted on May 27, 2010
Remember Art Capital Group's lawsuit against Annie Leibovitz? It took pains to point out the sophistication of her advisors:

News consumers, paywalls, and useless tourists

Posted on May 27, 2010
John Gapper returns to the subject of newspaper paywalls today, saying that in the UK, Rupert Murdoch's Times will have to appeal to a narrow elite if it is to succeed online -- something Murdoch has never been comfortable doing. Going after a mass audience online is hopeless, he says, in the face of much lower-cost competitors like the Huffington Post:

Counterparties

Posted on May 26, 2010
JPMC removes its "overweight" rating from National Bank of Greece. How did that work out? -- Jeff Matthews

Citigroup under pressure

Posted on May 26, 2010
Morgan Stanley did its job: it managed to sell 1.5 billion of the government's shares in Citigroup for a total of $6.2 billion, or just over $4.13 a share. That's a good price, compared both to today's close of $3.86 a share and to Treasury's cost basis of $3...

When a blogging award isn?t for blogging

Posted on May 26, 2010
Jim Prevor, a self-described "proud finalist for the Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism for work that originated online", sets me straight on the new blogging award:

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