Author Archives: Felix

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 →