Bailout

Congestion charging and biketopia

Posted on May 26, 2010
Matthew DeBord thinks that my Wired article about Charles Komanoff is really all about turning Manhattan into "biketopia". He couldn't be more wrong. Yes, Komanoff himself is a big advocate of biking. And yes, at the margin, having less traffic in midtown would help in terms of being able to create more bike lanes...

What they study at Chicago Business School

Posted on May 26, 2010
According to Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, in a short paper (pdf) they've written about the news diets of media figures, about 61.9% of the news I consume is conservative. That makes my news diet more conservative than 78% of internet users, and 88% of media figures.

Basel III: Grounds for optimism

Posted on May 26, 2010
If you're not a central banker and don't even know any central bankers, chances are that you've never heard of Global Risk Regulator, a trade publication in London. But right now it's very much worth paying attention to them, because their sources in and around Basel are unsurpassed...

Skymeter?s congestion pricing solution

Posted on May 25, 2010
My Wired article about Charles Komanoff went through a lot of editing, as you might expect for a story in the June issue of a magazine which starts with a lunch in December. And sadly, one of the big bits which ended up on the cutting-room floor was the stuff about Skymeter, a Toronto-based company which gets a brief shout-out at the end of the piece, and whose chief scientist, Bern Grush, has a great blog devoted entirely to congestion pricing.

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The Max Keiser U-turn

Posted on May 25, 2010
In 1995, Shearson Lehman options trader Max Keiser had a dream -- a dream of creating a futures exchange based on movie box-office grosses. It was a dream which lasted at least through 2007, when he gave an interview to Trader Daily's Robert LaFranco, wistfully talking about what might have been.

The sleazy world of predatory debt buyers

Posted on May 25, 2010
NEDAP has an extremely important new report on a particularly evil and sleazy part of the predatory financial universe: debt buyers. These institutions make hundreds of millions of dollars by suing people in low-income neighborhoods, often without properly serving them with notice that they're being sued...

Those panicky markets

Posted on May 25, 2010
Alphaville has most of the datapoints you need this morning. There's the European bourses, which started off low and basically haven't moved all day; the FTSE 100 is now pretty definitively below 5,000 for the first time since September. There's the flight-to-Germany trade: 10-year Bunds are now below 2...

NYT side door opens up again

Posted on May 25, 2010
Peter Kafka actually bothered to ask the NYT about how traffic from side doors (as opposed to the "front door", which is the home page) would be treated once the paywall goes up. And he got a pretty unambiguous answer:

Counterparties

Posted on May 25, 2010
My profile of Charles Komanoff and his congestion-pricing crusade -- Wired

Loebs and blogs don?t mix

Posted on May 25, 2010
Back in November, I had some advice for the Loeb judges: don?t start up a blogging award, it won?t work. They responded by making me a judge ? not of the blogging award, but of the Magazines category. The preliminary judging was held in Los Angeles in March, where the shortlists were decided...

Youthful swearing, cont.

Posted on May 25, 2010
Remember the Global Business Oath of the Young Global Leaders at Davos? Let me remind you: it's a terribly silly and earnest document which begins with "As a business leader I recognize that" and ends with "This pledge I make freely and upon my honor...

Counterparties

Posted on May 24, 2010
Crowded Rush-Hour Roads in Utrecht -- How We Drive

Does a European fire break exist?

Posted on May 24, 2010
Mohamed El-Erian had one of his most explicitly bearish op-eds yet in the WSJ this weekend, saying that "the unwind of unstable investor positions is still in its early stages". But he also talked a little about the necessary policy responses which have yet to be seen in Europe:

Dangerous strips

Posted on May 24, 2010
It's the headline which strikes you first: "Strippers Declare Inflation Dead as Dealers Revive Zero-Coupon Treasuries". Ha, strippers. Geddit? But behind the headline is a very long and dry article about the market in long-dated zero-coupon Treasury bonds, which apparently are all the rage right now:

Chart of the day: The NYT and the econoblogosphere

Posted on May 24, 2010
Jeff Bercovici finds a new study which shows just how important the NYT's business section is to its online franchise. Here's the chart:

The politics of finance

Posted on May 24, 2010
It's politics-of-finance day today, with The Big Money running an excerpt from Jonathan Alter's new book, about Paul Volcker and Larry Summers, while John Heilemann has a big New York cover story on the relationship between Obama, Geithner, and Wall Street.

Preparing for bank downgrades

Posted on May 24, 2010
Mark Gongloff goes out on a limb today, saying that if the final financial regulatory reform bill passes in anything like the form passed by the Senate, "the rating companies will almost certainly lower credit ratings for some of the biggest banks".

Counterparties

Posted on May 21, 2010
Long PHYS short GLD is earning >25% annualized -- Yahoo

The Shorebank rescue

Posted on May 21, 2010
There's a lot of conspiracy-theorizing going on around the high-level rescue of Chicago's ShoreBank by Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Bank of America, and General Electric. The founder of the bank is BFF with BHO, and Chicago politics being what it is, everybody is assuming that the banks involved are expecting some kind of political quid pro quo down the road, for rescuing one of Chicago's most-loved financial institutions.

Siwoti Friday: Kwak fisks Langeler

Posted on May 21, 2010
This is where the blogosphere comes into its own: Gerry Langeler, a venture capitalist, takes to Dealbook to try to defend the crazy way in which most of his income is taxed at the 15% capital gains rate. And then James Kwak reads his piece, comes down with an acute case of Siwoti, and delivers a textbook fisking of what passes for Langeler's argument.

Good news Friday: Litton withdraws in Ohio

Posted on May 21, 2010
While we're still celebrating the passage of the finance bill through the Senate, I hear this morning that Litton, the mortgage servicer owned by Goldman Sachs, will no longer auction off that house Ohio and try to kick the occupants out. Litton's law firm, Lerner, Sampson & Rothfuss, confirmed to me that the sheriff's sale is being withdrawn, and Jorge Newberry of AHP, who's trying to buy the house and lease it back to its current owners, says that although Litton has yet to approve the short sale, at least the Monday deadline is no longer looming.

The great news from the Senate

Posted on May 21, 2010
It's almost enough to restore your faith in government. The details have yet to be worked out -- and you can be sure that after letting the Senate deliver its own bill on its own terms, Treasury will be deeply involved in the reconciliation process, trying to marginalize any measures it doesn't like...

Counterparties

Posted on May 20, 2010
"Allen Stanford's pretrial incarceration has reduced him to a wreck of a man" who keeps on firing lawyers -- Reuters

How financiers are like illegal construction workers

Posted on May 20, 2010
Mark Beauchamp, following up from yesterday, provides some eye-popping numbers:

Revisiting the equity premium

Posted on May 20, 2010
Allison Schrager takes up the question of the equity premium today:

The weirdly rational flash crash

Posted on May 20, 2010
As the Dow started falling dramatically this morning, my colleague Frank Tantillo and I put together a Google spreadsheet comparing the Dow's current level to what it looked like at the low point on the flash crash day of May 6.

Viewing the euro crisis from Britain

Posted on May 20, 2010
The Economist's Charlemagne was unimpressed by my euro fantasia this morning: apparently I was the BBC's second choice for the spot, and was approached only after they had been turned down by more sober journalists.

Adventures in market reporting, short-selling edition

Posted on May 20, 2010
Everybody knows what happens to stocks when you try to ban short sales, right?

How the euro might collapse

Posted on May 20, 2010
I had a little three-minute fantasia this morning on Radio 4 in the UK; if you prefer text to audio, here you go. The idea was to give an idea of one way in which the euro might fall apart, but I had no idea, when I recorded it, that markets would plunge again today.

Counterparties

Posted on May 19, 2010
Volatility, luck and a margin of safety: An excellent round-up -- Abnormal Returns

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