Monthly Archives: July 2007

Hoping Apple Allows iPhone Wifi Without Cellular Service

John Guidon, the CEO of Row 44, is a big Apple fan, he tells
me, and would love to be talking to Cupertino about the iPhone problem.
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Subprime: The Cause Of All Market Moves

It’s all subprime’s fault.
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Posted in housing | Comments Off on Subprime: The Cause Of All Market Moves

Bruce Wagner Explicates the Hedonic Treadmill

It can be hard to define the hedonic
treadmill
in easy-to-understand terms.
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Posted in economics | Comments Off on Bruce Wagner Explicates the Hedonic Treadmill

Don’t Trust the CDS Market to Gauge Brokers’ Creditworthiness

For reasons I don’t fully understand, credit default swaps seem to have a tendency
to gap out much further than spreads on the underlying bonds.
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Rupert Murdoch, Victorious

It’s
finally happened
: News Corp has enough Bancroft votes that it’s going to
go ahead with its acquisition of Dow Jones.
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Democrats Capitulate on Hedge-Fund Tax

This morning’s WSJ fronts
some Democrats’ second thoughts about taxing hedge-fund managers’ income as,
well, income.
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Posted in taxes | 4 Comments

When GMU Economists Spar

The wonderful thing about having half a department blogging is that sometimes these discussions spill over onto the web, for all to enjoy.
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Economics Anonymous

Economists blogging I can
easily understand; economists blogging anonymously is harder.
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Hope For Wi-Fi In Airplanes

I think that John Guidon, of Row
44
, is the first CEO to leave
a comment under his own name
at Market Movers.
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Posted in technology | Comments Off on Hope For Wi-Fi In Airplanes

Rupert Murdoch: Probably Posturing

The Monday-at-5pm deadline has come and gone, and the WSJ, of course, has the
best coverage
of What On Earth Is Going On with the Bancrofts and Dow Jones.
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Great Moments in Punditry: Jim Cramer on Housing

If I have any ambitions of being a financial pundit, should I try to come up
with stuff like this, from Jim Cramer?
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Posted in housing, Media | Comments Off on Great Moments in Punditry: Jim Cramer on Housing

Joe Nacchio and the Conservative Investors

A 15% capital-gains tax bill is a lot less painful than owning a stock which plunges to zero.
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How the Equity-Research Sausage is Made

You can’t argue with Carl Bialik when he says,
apropos iPhone
sales
, that "conducting a flawed survey can be worse than not conducting
a survey at all".
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The Credit Duel, Part 2

The duel of the newsweekly pundits continues!
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Murdoch Says a Majority Isn’t Enough to Buy Dow Jones

Were they talking to me?
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Unlevered High-Risk Debt vs Levered Low-Risk Debt

Alea has found
a tantalizing tidbit from Anthony Morris of UBS, as reported
by Reuters
.
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Taking the Laptop on the Train or Plane

Kevin Maney wants
to know
why there isn’t wifi on Amtrak.
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Blogs and Stocks

On Monday of last week, Marc Andreessen broke
some big news
on his blog: he’d sold his company, Opsware, to HP for $1.6
billion in cash.
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Avant-Garde and Kitsch

The Epicurean Dealmaker reckons that modern art is rubbish
contemporary
art is kitsch
.
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Stock Market Forecasts: A Waste of Column Inches

Is there anything more useless than a long newspaper article about where the stock market might be headed?
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There’s No Morality In Bond Yields

Tim Reason says that borrowing costs “ought to reflect” credit risk. My response is that, most of the time they do. But that if and when they don’t, no bolts of lightning will necessarily descend from the Market Gods.
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Murdoch-Dow Jones: A Done Deal, Surely

Murdoch is going to go ahead with his Dow Jones acquisition no matter what, since he has substantially more than 50% of the vote behind him.
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Crawford Hill, Exemplary Epistolizer

Required
reading
: Crawford Hill‘s letter to the rest of the Bancroft
family, explaining in glorious detail how and why they deserve their fate of
selling out to Rupert Murdoch.
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Weekend Links Join the Plutocracy

Bill Clinton, blogger.
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Posted in remainders | 1 Comment

Bear Stearns Funds: Still More Questions Than Answers

Back on Monday, I had a whole set of unanswered
questions
about the collapsed Bear Stearns hedge funds. Today, we got news
– but no answers to those questions. In fact, there are now more questions
than ever.
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Posted in banking, bonds and loans, hedge funds | Comments Off on Bear Stearns Funds: Still More Questions Than Answers