Category Archives: Econoblog

Kirk Kerkorian has gone public with a low-ball, $4.5 billion bid for Chrysler. He knows the company well: he had a 10% stake in 1995, when he tried to buy it for $20 billion, and held onto that stake until … Continue reading →

So the lunch with Nassim Nicholas Taleb happened, in a rather pretentious little place on 15th Street, which at least was quiet. I arrived brimming with questions, and left with only a few of them answered, but had a great … Continue reading →

Marcy Gordon of the AP reports today that the SEC is easing up on some Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, specifically those which “require companies to assess the strength of their internal checks and balances to guard against fraud.” She continues: The framework … Continue reading →

Good to see Tim Hanrahan of the WSJ in Michelle Leder territory, reading Ford’s latest proxy filing: Chairman William Clay Ford and Chief Executive Alan Mulally were required to use company aircraft for all business and personal air travel for … Continue reading →

In the wake of New Century’s bankruptcy, Robert Lindsay gets his hands on the official list of the company’s biggest creditors. At the top of the list is Goldman Sachs, followed by Credit Suisse and a who’s-who of other big … Continue reading →

“An old cliché holds that when the U.S. economy sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold,” says David Wessel today, reporting on new IMF research which seems to show quite the opposite. “Sometimes,” he concludes, “a sneeze isn’t … Continue reading →

The Creativity Exchange finds this chart from National Geographic, wonderfully described by Mark Thoma as “like a 7th grade dance with the boys huddled together on one side of the room, the girls on the other”. Equally wonderfully, Thoma’s commenters … Continue reading →

Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman is about to officially become a multigazillionaire, once his company goes public and everybody knows what his stake is worth. But in the public mind, will he really have overtaken Henry Kravis as the ne plus ultra … Continue reading →

There are bad charts, and then there are really cool charts. Props to Nigel Holmes, at the New York Observer, for this one: Just nobody show it to Nouriel Roubini.

American Task Force Argentina is a Washington-based lobbying organization financed by vulture funds, which exists to extract money from the government of Argentina and move it instead to the hedge funds and others who own the country’s defaulted debt. They … Continue reading →

Can you remember a week of late in which Australia’s Macquarie didn’t buy something? Today, it’s a bunch of UK cellphone and TV antennas. Boring, right? Not when you see the price tag: $5 billion. What’s more Macquarie is opening … Continue reading →

David Gaffen has a cute piece up at Marketbeat today, looking at the number of news stories on the subprime mess which contain the word “contained” or its cognates. A Dow Jones Factiva search shows that the number of stories … Continue reading →

John Koblin at the New York Observer today tries to put price tags on New York’s most valuable skyscrapers, and certainly comes up with some eye-popping numbers. The General Motors Building, at 767 Fifth Avenue, is the most valuable building … Continue reading →

Will commercial mortgages of the 2007 vintage turn out to be as misguided as residential mortgages in 2006? Fitch Ratings thinks there’s a serious risk of that. Does this sound familiar to you? The phenomenon has granted borrowers easy access … Continue reading →

$40 million seems to be the going rate for an investment-bank CEO these days. Executive compensation expert Graef Crystal has done the math, and finds that the pay for Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs; Stanley O’Neal of Merrill Lynch; John … Continue reading →

Subscribers to the New York Times got an extra section to throw away unread this morning: DealBook, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s M&A-obsessed blog, now has a quarterly spin-off on paper. The Spring 2007 section is full of mildly fluffy articles about … Continue reading →

Peter Scaturro knows private banking. And when Nationsbank Bank of America bought the company he ran, US Trust, they thought they were buying his private-banking expertise at the same time. Think JP Morgan buying Bank One for Jamie Dimon, or … Continue reading →

Just how big is the Blackstone IPO? Over at DealJournal, Dana Cimilluca calls it “the biggest initial public offering since Google”. But in fact it’s much bigger than that. Check out Renaissance Capital’s league table of the biggest US IPOs … Continue reading →

Blogger Fred Wilson (oh, OK, he’s a venture capitalist too) has sold his West Village townhouse for $33.15 million, a downtown record. He bought it for $7.35 million in 2000. And the rest of Manhattan’s property market is still booming, … Continue reading →

For reasons I don’t pretend to understand, Credit Suisse and UBS — the two big Swiss banks — are also the two big international heavyweights in the world of Latin American equities. Recently, UBS beefed up its presence in Brazil … Continue reading →

I spent a very large chunk of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, sitting in my living room, watching the television, which told me nothing I didn’t already know. I spent a very large chunk of the following week reading hundreds of … Continue reading →

Have you been scratching your head, wondering why public companies, which drove US economic growth for decades, are rapidly being taken private — a seemingly backward step? I haven’t seen any really compelling explanation of this, but I’m beginning to … Continue reading →

Gabriel Kahn of the WSJ has a big front-page article datelined Milan today, on how it’s hard out there for a major Italian industrialist, what with having to deal with interference from the government all the time. Mr. Tronchetti Provera’s … Continue reading →

Sam Zell is providing equity in his bid for Tribune, and he’s certainly taking it private. What’s more, as we’ve seen, he’s loading Tribune up with the kind of debt load normally seen only in deals run by private-equity companies. … Continue reading →

Do you ever get the impression that risk just goes around in circles? I’m relatively sanguine about a lot of the risk being created in the financial system right now largely because so much of the risk has been moved … Continue reading →