Author Archives: Felix

Well, that was better than the market expected: Venezuela is paying $17.85 per share to buy back the outstanding stock in telecom company CANTV. The biggest stake is owned by Verizon, which will get $572.3 million, or about 25% less … Continue reading →

Doug Muir is a bit late to the story that Transparency International has released its 2006 corruption perceptions index: it actually came out back in November. But he is good at getting people to create pretty charts for him, like … Continue reading →

Douglas Durst isn’t impressed that the Freedom Tower is getting built: Some real estate experts questioned why the Freedom Tower was being built at the same time that the developer Larry A. Silverstein was getting ready to build three office … Continue reading →

Citibank announced today that more than 25% of the holders of Argentina’s outstanding Par and Disc Brady bonds have voted to accelerate, making the principal amount due and payable immediately. This means almost nothing, in practice, but it does show … Continue reading →

You’ve gotta love eBay. Back in November, a seller known as "hdgfund" found an old bottle of wine lying around – a 1909 Barolo, to be precise – and managed to sell it to "stefy27" for €350. Now, "hdgfund" is … Continue reading →

Tyler Cowen takes issue with Greg Clark, who has an interesting thesis – that world economic history can be explained by a move from a Malthusian world where the most successfully violent were the most reproductively successful, to a capitalist … Continue reading →

Dresdner Kleinwort certainly seems to know how to cause a stir! Analysts Stefan-Michael Staimann and Susanne Knips have put out a 50-page report on hedge funds, warning of a "great unwind". The report got picked up by Alan Abelson at … Continue reading →

I emailed Mike Peterson, the editor of Creditflux, to ask him about the "risk weight" figures we say yesterday. (If you recall, the risk weighting on synthetic CDOs went up from 2.89 in 2005 to 3.45 in 2006, but it … Continue reading →

The bad news? Ecuador’s missing the February 15 coupon payment on its 2030 bonds: it "lacks the funds", according to deputy economy minister Fausto Ortiz. The good news? Ecuador will make the payment, within the 30-day grace period. Net-net? Bonds … Continue reading →

I have a home equity line of credit (Heloc), on which I pay Prime – which is at the moment an uncomfortably high 8.25%. (I think that Prime is always Fed funds +300bp.) This is not debt I’m about to … Continue reading →

Carol Lancaster has a great post today taking apart President Bush’s 2008 budget to see where most of the aid money is going. In a nutshell, the big winners are, unsurprisingly, Afghanistan and Iraq, with over $1 billion each. Then, … Continue reading →

There’s a great debate raging over at Morgan Stanley’s Global Economic Forum today. Richard Berner kicks it off: The long-awaited meltdown in subprime mortgage lending is now underway, and it likely has further to go. Fears are rising that this … Continue reading →

Creditflux magazine has some interesting numbers out about the synthetic CDO market, as reported by Paul Davies in the FT today: Sales of public and private synthetic CDOs grew to $450bn in notional terms last year compared with $224bn in … Continue reading →

In a move quite stunning for how sensible it is, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is thinking of selling all or part of the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site to developers or private … Continue reading →

Back on Thursday, I mentioned that Citigroup had put coal-heavy utility company TXU on its list of companies which stood to benefit from global climate change. It’s maybe worth quoting the report at some length: “Grandfathering” We discussed various types … Continue reading →

Another Monday, another almost-gossipy piece about the Todd ‘n’ Maria show on the front page of the NYT business section. Two weeks ago it was David Carr; today it’s Landon Thomas, but the Grey Lady remains an expert at what … Continue reading →

Did the world really need yet another mutual-fund gimmick? The Liberty Investment Group seems to think so: it’s launched something called the Index of Economic Freedom Portfolio to no little acclaim. Here’s Mark Skousen: Spath and Kirkscey back-tested the performance … Continue reading →

David Smith has an interesting piece today about the Bank of England. The Bank kept rates on hold at its last meeting, but it could easily have hiked: the markets were on tenterhooks as the annoucement approached. (When was the … Continue reading →

Larry Summers weighs in on the climate change discount rate issue in the Martin Wolf forum: A corollary of Stern’s assumption that marginal utility declines only slowly with income is that risk aversion is not that great. Question for John … Continue reading →

Now here’s an interesting thing: Mike Mandel, on his blog, has managed to avoid the housing mania which seems to have overtaken much of the rest of the blogosphere, myself included. No talk about credit crunches, no talk about housing-led … Continue reading →

Since moving to felixsalmon.com, I’ve tried to lay off the metajournalism. This is meant to be a finance and economics blog, after all, and there’s no reason why people who are interested in finance and economics should want to read … Continue reading →

Hillary Clinton wants to spend oil companies’ profits to subsidize R&D in the energy sector. Al Gore and Richard Branson have another idea: they’re offering $25 million to the person who comes up with the best way of removing carbon … Continue reading →

Travis Daub finds a Pablo Päster column: Producing and shipping one bottle of Fiji bottled water around the globe consumes nearly 27 liters of water, nearly a kilogram of fossil fuels, and generates more than a pound of carbon dioxide … Continue reading →