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Author Archives: Felix
Adventures in Structured Credit, Ratings Edition
Take a bunch of AA-rated securities. Boring, I know. So instead of just buying them, buy them with leverage, to boost their returns. Now, take that bundle of leveraged AA-rated debt, and tranche it, so that there’s a super-senior AAA-rated … Continue reading
Posted in bonds and loans
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Fred Wilson Can’t get a Prepaid iPhone
If you buy an iPhone, you have to sign up for a two-year contract with AT&T. Your bill comes every month, and then you pay it. Because you’re paying the bill after you make the phone calls, this is a … Continue reading
Posted in technology
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Metaphor of the Day
Justin Urquhart-Stewart of Seven Investment Management, quoted by the BBC: "You have to look at all these bad loans as a bit like a blancmange that’s been hit very heavily by a spade and it’s gone everywhere."
Posted in banking
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Banks’ Capital in the Era of Re-Intermediation
Charles Goodhart says in the FT today that there’s loads of money sloshing around the banking system; what’s missing is not liquidity, but capital. He explains: Just as the central bank is lender of last resort to banks, so banks … Continue reading
Posted in banking, regulation
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Pimco’s Endowments
Jenny Anderson moves the El-Erian story forwards today, talking to a number of former endowment chiefs about how tough the job is, and finding one startling statistic: Nationally, more than 40 percent of the top investment executives within universities and … Continue reading
Posted in investing
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ATM Fees as Bully Tactic
In the literature, the question of ATM fees is generally considered to be a regulatory problem: should they be banned? In the real world, Bank of America has raised its ATM fee to $3. Which is the kind of thing … Continue reading
Posted in banking
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The Economics of Economist.com
Last week, when hunting for an article about geobrowsers, Stefan Geens discovered that the most recent issue of the Economist was available for free at economist.com. And this week, the same thing seems to be true. He emails me: For … Continue reading
Posted in Media
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The Northern Rock Bailout
What to make of the Northern Rock bailout? To me, it looks like textbook central banking on the part of the Bank of England. Mervyn King, the BofE’s chief, has no particular interest in cutting interest rates or otherwise bailing … Continue reading
Why Bjorn Lomborg is Wrong
Mark Thoma has an excerpt of Partha Dasgupta’s review of Bjorn Lomborg’s new book today. It took me a while to get Dasgupta’s point, so let me try and rephrase it in a slightly simpler manner, since it was pretty … Continue reading
Posted in climate change
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Art Blogging
Portfolio.com launched its new art blog, Figure Painting, last month, and I’ve been an occasional contributor there ever since. (Which is one reason why you’re not going to find much art-related content in Market Movers any more.) My contributions can … Continue reading
Posted in art
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Fed Funds Update
Just before I went on holiday on August, I offered up a cheeky chart of the Fed funds rate, suggesting that the Fed had stealthily cut rates between meetings. (This was before it actually cut the discount rate.) Greg Mankiw … Continue reading
Posted in fiscal and monetary policy
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Prepayment Penalties
The NYT’s Geraldine Fabrikant reports today on moves to abolish prepayment penalties in the mortgage market. I think this is a good idea, although it would have been a much better idea a few years ago, when loans with teaser … Continue reading
Posted in housing
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Getting Your Priorities Straight
Investing advice for the ages, from Russian billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov, when asked what he would do with $50 million to invest: "If we are talking about up to $50 million, it’s better to spend it on yourself."
Posted in investing
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Distressed Debt Starts to go Mainstream
I mentioned on Monday that retail investors have a hard time buying up structured debt products which look very much as though they’re being underpriced in the present credit crunch. Today comes the news that in the wake of TCW … Continue reading
Posted in bonds and loans
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The Central Banking Confidence Game
Monetary policy, at heart, is largely about confidence. Yes, the main tool that a central bank has at its disposal is the level of overnight interest rates, but the level of overnight interest rates, in and of itself, has relatively … Continue reading
Posted in fiscal and monetary policy
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Burning Water
This story seems to be doing the rounds, with the implication that a chap named John Kanzius seems to have invented a perpetual-motion machine. Of course, he doesn’t quite come out and say so, but here, see for yourself: An … Continue reading
Posted in climate change
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Homeownership is an Investment, not a Moral Good
How can I have forgotten to mention John Leland’s piece in the New York Times this morning, when I was responding to Matt Cooper? I blame a lack of coffee. Leland cites the Census Bureau as saying that housing costs … Continue reading
Posted in housing
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iPhone Sales: Not Dreadful, Not Spectacular Either
Jeff Matthews is getting a lot of blogosphere linkage for his piece saying that iPhone sales are much lower than the likes of Gene Munster would like to think. But here’s how Matthews’ logic works: The 10,000-a-day consensus among Wall … Continue reading
Posted in technocrats
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Carbon Taxes vs Cap-and-Trade in the WSJ
Deborah Solomon today has a good primer on one of my pet subjects, carbon taxes vs cap-and-trade. She says that it’s "the biggest political battle in Washington over climate change," however, which is over-egging the pudding a lot: the economists … Continue reading
Posted in climate change
1 Comment
Freddie Mac vs AHM
What a clusterfuck. When American Home Mortgage went bankrupt, Freddie Mac seized $7 million in payments that homeowners had made, some of which was for insurance payments and property taxes. But American Home refused to give Freddie Mac the files … Continue reading
Posted in housing
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Does Paulson Really Think the Credit Crunch Will Last a Decade?
How long does Hank Paulson think this credit crunch will last? According to the FT, it could be a decade: The crisis of confidence in credit markets is likely to last longer than previous financial shocks of the past two … Continue reading
Posted in bonds and loans
3 Comments
The Downside of Homeownership, Part 2
A short response to Matt Cooper, on the subject of homeownership, since I’ve basically said my piece at this point. Matt says that "the social advantages to home ownership seem well documented". I say that a society with high levels … Continue reading
Posted in housing
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Greenspan’s New Fiscal Worries
John Cassidy rightly eviscerates Alan Greenspan in the October issue of Portfolio. Cassidy concentrates on Greenspan’s role in inflating the credit bubble which is currently bursting: "For a Fed chairman to have one speculative bubble inflate during his tenure is … Continue reading
Posted in fiscal and monetary policy
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How to Break a CPDO
CPDOs, or Constant Proportion Debt Obligations, were briefly popular at the end of 2006 as a way of getting high returns on AAA-rated paper. At the time, many commentators (notably excluding myself) said that CPDOs were too good to be … Continue reading
Posted in derivatives
1 Comment
El-Erian to Head Pimco Push into Alternative Investments
>A bit more information on the
El-Erian front this morning, with Pimco’s Bill Gross talking
to the Wall Street Journal. The big news is that Pimco seems to be interested
in getting into the alternative investments:
Continue reading
Posted in investing
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