Ratings agency Standard & Poors has managed a stunt which to my knowledge has no precedent in the history of the dark art of ratings. It downgraded some not all that highly structured commercial mortgage bonds last week to an eyepopping degree, from AAA to BBB-, just this side of being junk. Then they restored […]
Read more...The very fact an op-ed piece (more accurately, comment, as they call them in the Financial Times) by Paul Boyle against airbrushed accounting needed to be written at all is troubling. A move is afoot that appears further advanced than I realized is to fool with financial firm statements so as to reduce the procyclical […]
Read more...Please read my latest comment: Why is Small Beautiful? And please post comments here on NC. Kind regards, Leo Kolivakis
Read more...Until I figure out a way to quickly copy and paste hyperlinks from Blogger to WordPress, I invite you to go to my blog and read my latest comment: Street Fighters and their Pension Clients You can leave your comments here on NC. Kind regards, Leo Kolivakis
Read more...As readers may recall, we had been skeptical (and critical) of the Public Private Investment Partnership from the outset. It was the third effort at a program that had failed twice under Hank Paulson, namely, to have banks get dud assets off their balance sheets by selling them to a sucker. That’s why this program […]
Read more...Elizabeth Warren, head of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the TARP, has been a vocal advocate for the need for a financial product safety commission. The notion, which seemed quixotic a few weeks ago, is getting consideration by the Obama Administration. Given how industry friendly Team Obama’s financial services industry measures have been, it runs […]
Read more...Nassim Nicholas Taleb gave a presentation in New York yesterday which hews closely to a recent piece of his, although his talk did include some additional interesting charts and anecdotes. The article is worthwhile, and worth your attention, but let me highlight the two things I found most interesting. First was his “fourth quadrant” construct. […]
Read more...James Kwak, discussing a recent Bernanke speech defending financial innovation and a Ryan Avent post parsing it, underscored Avent’s observation that Bernanke had trouble coming up with an example of the sort that the financial services had in mind these days (ie, novel products making use of derivatives and other risk slicing, dicing, and distribution […]
Read more...You simply cannot make this stuff up. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Board, which backstops defined benefit plans (yes, Virginia, they still exist) faced a rather sizable gap between its expected returns on its $64 billion in holdings and its expected liabilities. So in a stroke of sheer genius, it increased its allocation to risky assets […]
Read more...The New York Times seems to have the inside skinny on the emerging private public partnership abortion program. And it appears to be consistent with (low) expectations: a lot of bells and whistles to finesse the fact that the government will wind up paying well above market for crappy paper. Key points: The three-pronged approach […]
Read more...The financial services industry is full cry in its demands for taxpayers to save its hide. From Bloomberg: Bill Gross, co-chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., said the U.S. may slump into a “mini depression” unless policy makers spend trillions of dollars to spur growth. “This economy needs support from the government, a […]
Read more...L’affaire Madoff gets more interesting by the day. I had though the failure to pursue the hedge fund scamster had more to do with incompetence and a disinclination to go after investment managers (insider trading cases, which is what seems to get the SEC’s enforcement division juices going, usually pick up penny ante players at […]
Read more...Now naive folks like me subscribe to the fantasy that a reputable newspaper maintains a church/state separation between its editorial pages and its news section. And then we have the Wall Street Journal as a telling counterexample. Last week, the Journal ran a op-ed piece by one Peter Schiff, a rather vocal libertaran and goldbug […]
Read more...Those of you antique enough to remember Peter Lynch, storied investor who took Fidelity’s once obscure Magellan fund from $18 million to $14 billion in assets (and a seemingly unmanageable 1,000 positions) may also recall that he was famous as a tireless stockpicker. He wrote a book for retail investors, Beating the Street. One of […]
Read more...While no one hedge fund index is comprehensive. all the reports to date point the same way: the hedge fund industry lost its clients a lot of money in 2008. While you can blame the horrid results on the dreadful environment across a host of asset classes, a very real sense, the funds became victim […]
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