The Wall Street Journal’s daily human interest story featured a holiday season tale of the Fuggerei, a Roman Catholic housing compound for the poor in Germany. The price of admission for those lucky enough to get in is yearly rent of one Rhein guilder, which equals 88 euro cents or $1.23, plus daily prayers for […]
Read more...I was quite taken with this post of our occasional guest blogger Cassandra (who holds forth at Cassandra Does Tokyo). I hope you enjoy it as well. From Cassandra: Thumbing through the sell-side research from their multitudes of Strategists, I notice some recurring phrases, small and innocuous as they may be, that trouble me. Time […]
Read more...L’affaire Madoff continues to garner front-page coverage. Yet I find the stories peculiarly unsatisfying, since they are peeling the onion one layer at a time, failing to answer the questions I find most interesting: was his fund ever a legitimate operation, or was it a con from the beginning? And where did the money go? […]
Read more...So where is my bailout? Now even hedge funds can borrow super cheap if they invest in securitized consumer loans. Really, the Fed is going about this all wrong. Why let hedge fund have all the fun? Private citizens have perilous little to show for all the kazillions thrown at the financial system. The Fed […]
Read more...This is by Cassandra, who sometimes does us the favor of guest blogging: Mr. Ogechukwu Kanma (Bank Manager)Union Bank PLC Lagos Branch Lagos, Nigeria Attn/President/CEO Dear Sir, I am Ogechukwu Kanma, Bank Manager of Union Bank PLC, Lagos Branch. I got your contact from the World Trade Center (W.T.C.) Regional office in Lagos, Nigeria although the details of […]
Read more...The Madoff revelations continue apace. The latest tidbit is that the records are such a mess that it may take the Securities Investors’ Protection Corporation six months (!) to make meaningful headway in unravelling Madoff books and records. From the Financial Times: Bernard Madoff left behind a trail of “falsified” and “unreliable” records, hampering efforts […]
Read more...So how did Madoff get away with his $50 billion fraud? Time will tell when and how it started, although I’d hazard the dot com bust. Madoff may have been unwilling to report losses, and assumed (initially) that no one would be hurt if he fibbed if he could eventually trade his way out of […]
Read more...Yet another credit crunch casualty: venture capital firms, and potentially, their portfolio companies. The Wall Street Journal reports that VCs are seeing an increasing number of rebuffs, some borne of necessity, when they hit up their limited partners for dough (reader note: investors in private equity and venture capital funds do not remit the full […]
Read more...The situation described in this Financial Times story is not earth shaking in dollar terms, but illustrates that corporate bankruptcies leave a trail of destruction in their wake. A number of funds were caught when Lehman failed, and the UK bankruptcy process may take a decade to resolve, leaving assets frozen in the meantime: Several […]
Read more...Um, a bit late to come to that realization, don’tcha think? From Barron’s (hat tip reader Michael): That ‘’super spike” in oil prices that Goldman insisted would lift crude to $200 a barrel ….? ….It never really turned out to be that prescient: instead of the 50% jump in oil that Goldman anticipated back in […]
Read more...In the stone ages, when I worked for a short while at Goldman, it would have been unthinkable to trade openly against clients. But those proprieties were abandoned long ago. In 2007, the firm was unapologetic about its decision to short the subprime market (a big, perhaps the big reason for its departure from industry […]
Read more...The high concept of this Wall Street Journal story is that because the stocks have fallen so badly, institutional investor may have to cut their real estate exposures to keep them from becoming a disproportionately large component of their portfolios. Note however that this may not be achieved via sales, but simply by not making […]
Read more...It looks like the perenially optimistic analyst community is finally getting the message that the recession will be nasty. From Bloomberg: Analysts are slicing profit forecasts for U.S. companies in the fourth quarter and 2009 as third- period results miss projections at the highest rate in almost 11 years. “Estimates have been coming down with […]
Read more...I am leery of formulaic approaches to investing and this New York Times article confirmed my prejudices. Conventional wisdown says forget market timing (you are bound to get it wrong and lose out). However, today Mark Hulbert advocates an anti-market-timing strategy: go into cash when markets become volatile. But that seems as difficult to execute […]
Read more...Morgan Stanley’s money market funds were hit by major redemptions in September, and the firm stepped in to fund half of the withdrawals itself, presumably out of a view that selling the underlying fund assets into a deteriorating market would only lead to distressed prices. But one has to wonder whether the positions that Morgan […]
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