It isn’t hard to see that the lack of decent information about how serious the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is is almost certainly due to obfuscation on the part of BP. The puzzling part is how BP can fantasize that it ultimately gains from this conduct, and why the Obama Administration tolerates it. The frustration […]
Read more...When the SEC filed its civil suit against Goldman, the firm and its stalwarts argued that the firm would come through with its reputation intact. Anyone who watched Goldman over the last decade had reason to doubt that cheery view. The firm has undergone a remarkable change, from one that was notoriously aggressive but had […]
Read more...Ooh, this gets uglier and uglier the harder one looks at this. From the Associated Press via ABC (hat tip reader Glenn Stehle): The federal agency responsible for ensuring that an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico was operating safely before it exploded last month fell well short of its own policy that inspections […]
Read more...The drama of financial regulatory reform is, to a considerable degree, playing right into the industry’s hands. I have several pet theories as to why this has happened. One is the fact that the drafting of new rules and the related horse-trading started before there had been any meaningful investigations, and more important, there did […]
Read more...Many of my investor buddies e-mail each other frequently during the day (yes, e-mail, not IM or tweet) and I am on the periphery of some of their discussions. One of them took note of the fact that the libertarians in this crowd had gone silent on the question of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, […]
Read more...The line of thinking that underlies an investigation by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo is a challenge to conventional wisdom about the financial crisis. The prevailing view is that since credit ratings were one of the single biggest points of failure in the crisis, the ratings agencies were one of the biggest, if not […]
Read more...By Glenn Stehle, an engineer who began working in the oil industry in 1974. After a two-year stint with Cities Service Oil Company, he worked for two years for Henry Engineering, a petroleum engineering consulting firm. Upon leaving Henry Engineering he worked as an independent engineering consultant in all facets of the oil and gas […]
Read more...The collateralized debt obligation probe widens. From the Wall Street Journal: The banks under early-stage criminal scrutiny—J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG and UBS AG—have also received civil subpoenas from the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a sweeping investigation of banks’ selling and trading of mortgage-related deals, the person […]
Read more...Frank Partnoy, derivatives salesman turned law professor, took an ill fated star turn in the Financial Times today. In a comment titled, “Goldman is wrong target for official censure,” he writes (among other things): “Goldman is not to blame for the financial crisis,” a straw man if I ever saw one. I hate to say […]
Read more...A lot of people are still feeling very bruised by last Friday’s market actions (Felix Salmon went as far as ordering all retail investors to get out of the pool). A message from a reader with ample trading desk experience: BTW, hope you didn’t have any sell-stops yesterday, WTF was that?!?!? I covered my SPY […]
Read more...By Glenn Stehle, an engineer who began working in the oil industry in 1974. After a two-year stint with Cities Service Oil Company, he worked for two years for Henry Engineering, a petroleum engineering consulting firm. Upon leaving Henry Engineering he worked as an independent engineering consultant in all facets of the oil and gas […]
Read more...By Richard Smith, a London-based capital markets IT specialist Here’s someone with his head screwed on, back in April 2007, who proves singlehandedly that “hoocoodanode” was no defense for failing to anticipate the implosion of the shadow banking system (more on this prescient analyst in due course): For several years now, we have marvelled at […]
Read more...The defenders of the economic orthodoxy have gotten much more shrill of late. In a perverse way, this is probably a positive sign: they might be feeling a tad worried that they are starting to lose their hold over consensus reality. But given how quick various media outlets are to pick up and amplify their […]
Read more...By Buzz Potamkin, former studio executive and producer, in the biz for 40+ years, now a consultant Every investment in film is gambling. Schuyler Moore, April 22, 2010, testimony before the House Agriculture Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities Futures are a hedge against some event yet to come, representing the desire by a participant to […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. The recent financial crisis has shown that the legal and regulatory steps that have been taken to provide information […]
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