Scientists to study synthetic telepathy PhysOrg. Now if you want to read about the US military’s forays into telepathy of the non-synthetic sort, read The Men Who Stare At Goats. You cannot make this sort of thing up. Police Turn to Secret Weapon: GPS Device Washington Post. Without warrants, too. Merrill May Cut Dividend for […]
Read more...Bloomberg reports that Lehman is in talks with BlackRock to spruce up its balance sheet by disposing of a big chunk of its commercial real estate portfolio. The article indicates that the firm intends to sell slightly less than half of its $40 billion holdings. Ladenburg Thalmann’s analyst Richard Bove anticipates the losses (presumably from […]
Read more...Ah, how distant early 2007 seems. Remember how the private equity business was going gangbusters, M&A was at record levels, and no deal was too big to get done. Then the credit markets hit the wall, leaving a lot of investment banks holding LBO debt that they hadn’t sold (the most common mechanism had been […]
Read more...Remember a few months ago a big secret in plain sight was that many banks were awfully slow about foreclosing on deadbeat homeowners. Some of this was arguably not due to gameplaying but a function of overloaded servicing departments that were understaffed and backed up. But in many cases, the belief was that the delays […]
Read more...Clumsy young ‘face obesity risk’ BBC Cooking and Cognition: How Humans Got So Smart LiveScience Olympic ceremony singer faked performance Financial Times The Reagan Myth: Conservatives and Greed ataxingmatter Securities Market Remains Jammed, a Year Later Vikas Bajaj, New York Times. An update on the securitization market. China’s slowdown to continue Asia Times but keep […]
Read more...This Bloomberg piece, “Banks’ Subprime Losses Top $500 Billion on Writedowns” has some sloppy writing, but I am featuring it nevertheless because it presents some useful data and its headline factoid will no doubt be misconstrued. The headline refers to subprime when in fact the article tallies total creidt crund losses and writedowns, not just […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal tells us “Freddie Mac Will Stop Buying New York Subprime Mortgages.” The reason? The state has implemented a new category of subprime mortgages, and, horrors, made them subject to “assignee liability”. In simple terms, if you are in the food chain that sold dodgy paper to an end investor, they can […]
Read more...This post is by Jim Fitch of Some Assembly Required. Cheer up, this may be the last crisis of the oil age. Does This Dress Make Me Look Fat? The Fed needs to raise rates to combat inflation… while lowering rates to encourage economic growth. Congress needs to exercise fiscal responsibility… while bolstering the economy. […]
Read more...Eat kangaroo to ‘save the planet’ BBC Mixed fortunes for world’s whales BBC New evidence implicates humans in prehistoric animal extinctions PhysOrg Property market grinds to a halt amid mortgage drought Times Online MBIA DESERVES to Go Belly Up Barry Ritholtz Whispers of a Watergate for Bush Clive Crook, Financial Times Fed Watch: The Rapid […]
Read more...One of the shifts in leading edge conventional wisdom is the “cities are cool” sentiment. It’s a lagging indicator, so lagging as to set for a near-term reversal. Mind you, I like cities and particularly like not owning a car, which limits me to particularly densely populated and/or enlightened metropolises. The logic of the new-found […]
Read more...Dear readers, Am back from Alaska. Despite part of the trip being a fiasco, I recommend you go if you haven’t already. The people are very nice (it’s one of the few places in the US where communities still matter) and the sights really are spectacular. For instance, in one afternoon I had 68 humpback […]
Read more...I’ve been watching and reading about events in Georgia and Ossetia with some interest. I didn’t post over the weekend because there really didn’t seem much left to say. Earnings season is tapering off with no real shocks, just a bunch of financial write-downs and a sense of general foreboding in all but the export […]
Read more...One of the primary lessons we are learning from the current financial debacle is that the lack of transparency in the OTC derivatives markets is one of the big reasons for the complete breakdown of those markets. Furthermore, the lack of appropriate oversight into those markets allowed problems to fester rather than being noticed and […]
Read more...This post is by Jim Fitch of Some Assembly Required. When someone tells you the current crisis is“near the end”, ask them which end. Resiliency : Proving once again their resourcefulness, American consumers ran up twice as much credit card debt in June as economists thought possible, increasing their total Visa bill to $2.59 trillion. […]
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