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Author Archives: Felix
In Defense of Credit Indices
I was quite
rude about the ABX.HE indices this morning, but, like all hedging mechanisms,
they do serve an important purpose.
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Posted in derivatives
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Let Fannie and Freddie Buy Profitable Mortgages
Is it a good idea to lift restrictions on the kind of mortgages that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can buy? In a word, yes.
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Posted in housing
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The ABX Indices: Making the Bad Seem Worse
The ABX.HE indices are a pretty weak indication of what mortgage-backed
bonds are actually worth.
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Posted in bonds and loans, derivatives
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How Politicians Can Help Fix the Mortgage Mess
Hillary Clinton has a plan to address
the subprime mortgage mess, and, to my surprise, it’s actually eminently
sensible.
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Why CEOs Don’t Resign
Let me try to answer Matt Cooper’s question:
How come Warren Spector has been fired from Bear Stearns, but
Jimmy Cayne is still there?
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Posted in defenestrations
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IMF: Strauss-Kahn Joins the Side of the Angels
Dominique Strauss-Kahn apparently wants to reform
the process which is used to choose the IMF’s managing director –
the very process which has just landed him in that job.
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Posted in IMF
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Andre Esteves, UBS’s Very Expensive New Debt Head
At the end of 2006, UBS bought Brazil’s Banco Pactual for $2.6 billion. The
managing partner of Pactual, Andre Esteves, owned 30% of Pactual,
and so, naturally, he stayed on salary at UBS.
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Posted in banking
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Free the NYT’s Archives!
Holly Sanders of the New York Post is reporting
that the NYT is finally going to abolish its idiotic TimesSelect service –
and about time too.
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Posted in Media
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Mea Minima Culpa
Starting on August 30th, before we invest in low-yield, illiquid securities with high default risk we promise to “think-twice”.
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Posted in remainders
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When Competition Increases Sales
You’re in a market and a competitor arrives. Should you be worried? Not always.
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Posted in economics
2 Comments
WSJ Anoints Carlos Slim as World’s Richest Man
I was travelling over the weekend, and so I missed David Luchnow’s
profile
of Carlos Slim in the WSJ. Boy am I glad I found it now!
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Posted in wealth
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The Jumbo Mortgage Window Slams Shut
Are we in the middle of a fully-blown credit crunch, or is this merely an unpleasant and discontinuous repricing? The answer to that question lies in whether credit is available at any price.
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Posted in bonds and loans
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Privatization and Subsidies Don’t Mix
James Surowiecki says, quite rightly, that the US student-loan
system is one
enormous boondoggle for private lenders to students.
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Posted in privatization
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Measuring Home Preferences
Would you rather have a 4,000-square-foot house in a neighborhood of 6,000-square-foot McMansions, or a 3,000-square-foot home in a zone of 2,000-square-foot bungalows?
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Posted in economics
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Why Cap-and-Trade is the Best Route to a Carbon Tax
Greg Mankiw has a
simple equation:
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Posted in climate change
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Answering Three Questions on Climate Change
Paul Klemperer has three
unanswered questions on climate change. I can’t answer them fully, of course,
but it might be useful to at least make a first-order approximation, or an attempt
at one.
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Posted in climate change
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Of Course You Can Disprove Religion
And Eliezer Yudkowsky does it, wonderfully.
Posted in Not economics
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The Sâgë of Omaha
Berkshire Hathaway and Ikea could be a match made in heaven.
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Posted in M&A
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Melted Cramer on Toast
Jim Cramer is the Britney Spears of the financial
punditocracy: famous for being famous, great at attracting attention in a trainwreck
kind of way, self-destructive and self-loathing,
and completely, utterly out of control.
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Posted in Media
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Nardelli, Act 3
It’s both surprising and unsurprising that Nardelli has now popped up as
the
new CEO of Chrysler.
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Posted in private equity
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When Hedge Fund Investors Lose Confidence
Jenny Anderson is
worried that when hedge-fund investors get their monthly statements in July,
they’ll start to panic.
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Posted in hedge funds, personal finance
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Mexico’s Financial System: Strong, Not Weak
Joel Kurtzman has a rather needlessly
aggressive attack on those inefficient Mexcians on the op-ed page of today’s
WSJ.
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Posted in emerging markets
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How to Make Aid Work
Are you a little bit bored of the "does aid work" debate? Well, so
is Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and in a tour de force 20-minute talk
at the end of TEDGlobal, she asked us all to get "a bit more sophisticated"
in terms of how we approach such questions.
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Posted in development
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Was There a Murdoch “Jerk Premium”?
Dan Gross reckons
that Rupert Murdoch paid a "jerk premium" of "somewhere
between $760 million and $1.22 billion" to take over Dow Jones and the
Wall Street Journal. Anybody else, he says, could have bought it for less:
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Posted in Media, publishing
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Countrywide Falls to Book Value
Dave Neubert is buying
shares in Countrywide, and it seems he’s mainly looking at one crucial indicator:
the price-to-book ratio.
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