Author Archives: Felix

Greg Palast is an admirably bulldoggish reporter. Pop over to his blog, and you’ll see that the last six entries are all on the subject of vulture funds in general, and the Donegal vs Zambia case in particular. Palast reported … Continue reading →

I’m a little bit late to the game, here, but let me point you to the latest piece from Thomas Palley, entitled "Expand Sarbox, Not Shrink It". The idea is that US shareholders need more protection, not less, and Palley … Continue reading →

I’m still waiting for Dean Baker’s blog entry on why the risk of a credit crunch means that we should start importing more white collar professionals now. But in the mean time, enjoy this, from the New York Times leader … Continue reading →

Have you read Nelson Schwartz’s profile of Steve Schwartzman? The best quote in the piece goes to Schwartzman himself: "I’m in it because I like to be excellent and to win." Schwartzman is painted as yet another humorless billionaire financier … Continue reading →

I’ve been looking a bit at JetBlue, and what happened to its stock price over the past 10 days or so. The airline was hit very badly by New York’s snowstorm on Wednesday the 14th: that day, and the following … Continue reading →

I love getting nerdy with EMTA’s volume surveys, and now they’ve released the big annual survey for all of 2006. In case the press release has disappeared behind a firewall again, here’s the gist: Emerging Markets debt trading reached its … Continue reading →

I’ve finally put Andrew Leonard in my RSS reader, despite the Salon firewall, because he really is worth reading. Still, he does have a habit of being a bit on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand when it comes to systemic risks and subprime lending and … Continue reading →

Free Exchange and Blodget agree: past performance is no guide to future results, when it comes to mutual-fund returns. Is this true? I posed the question back in 2004, when I wrote this: When a rather obnoxious man at Citibank … Continue reading →

So there’s this Great Moderation, right? And the hedge funds are part of it. Look at all of them with their high alpha underperforming the S&P 500: in other words, by bringing down beta to incredibly low levels. Which is … Continue reading →

The Children’s Investment Fund sounds so cuddly, doesn’t it? And in fact it does give a large chunk of its profits to charity. But it gets those profits by buying up stakes in undervalued companies and forcing management to shake … Continue reading →

Aaaaarrrrgh! Why is it that when the debate over discount rates and climate change finally makes it into David Leonhardt’s NYT column, he gets it completely wrong? The Stern Review assumed that a dollar of economic damage prevented a century … Continue reading →

David Smith (no Labourite he) on Gordon Brown: It is hard to find too much to criticise in the macroeconomic record of the past 10 years. Any chancellor who leaves office having presided over growth in every single quarter can … Continue reading →

On Monday, London’s congestion zone doubled in size. The idea seems to be that if congestion charging is good (and so far the congestion charge has been a success), then more congestion charging is better. But John Kay explains cogently … Continue reading →

The NYT’s Geraldine Fabrikant had a long, loving profile of Yale’s David Swensen on Saturday which says pretty much all the things you’d expect such a profile to say, including how noble he is to toil away for a mere … Continue reading →

It was inevitable sooner or later, and now Mel Karmazin, of Sirius, has finally decided to buy agreed to merge with his great rival, XM. The decision seems to have been made on the basis that it’ll be easier to … Continue reading →

I’m back! Didja miss me? I missed you. I was in England, mainly (when I wasn’t stuck on the tarmac at JFK), where even cafés encrypt their wifi. Most annoying. But even if internet access was hard, I did get … Continue reading →

Historically, illegal immigrants in the US have always had access to some kind of credit, even if it was only loan sharks or payday lenders. The big problem has been access to banking: getting a simple checking or savings account … Continue reading →

Do hedge funds, in aggregate, generate positive alpha? If they do, that’s quite impressive, seeing as how mutual funds, in aggregate, generate significantly negative alpha. Of course, the question is hard to answer, for two main reasons: Firstly, measuring alpha … Continue reading →

You knew that global warming was bad. But did you know it was this bad? If it gets too warm, what is going to happen with traditional wines like Barolo and Burgundy? They grow in such specifically mild climates and … Continue reading →

The literature on emerging-market debt defaults is dominated by sovereign debt. People talk a lot more about Ecuador and Argentina than they do about corporates. But there’s one company whose default was so messy and so large that it’s entered … Continue reading →

They were complaining to the Senate back in October: "Recent proposals by the regulators, while well-intentioned, have the potential to reduce the availability of affordable credit [and] adversely affect competition among banks," said Jim Garnett, a top risk-management official at … Continue reading →

I’ve been reading the Sandy Weill page on Wikipedia, trying to work out why he was so attached to that bloody red umbrella: he only bought Travelers in 1993, and then he spun it off from Citigroup in 2002. [UPDATE: … Continue reading →