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Author Archives: Felix
GDP and the Decline of National Statistics
Zubin has a good roundup of reactions to the latest GDP numbers, which basically amount to a lot of economists caught wrong-footed and desperately trying to explain why a 3.3% growth rate isn’t anything like as healthy as one might … Continue reading
Posted in statistics
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The FBI and Mortgages
The LAT’s Richard Schmitt knows how to write a startling lede: WASHINGTON — Long before the mortgage crisis began rocking Main Street and Wall Street, a top FBI official made a chilling, if little-noticed, prediction: The booming mortgage business, fueled … Continue reading
Why Infrastructure Privatization is Moving Slowly
Jenny Anderson has an evenhanded overview of US infrastructure privatization today. In a nutshell: it’s necessary, but it’s going to happen very slowly. The good news is that the media is moving away from "OMG the government is selling off … Continue reading
Posted in infrastructure
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Extra Credit, Tuesday Edition
Trade of The Day: Buy Freddie Paper With Fed Leverage Their loss is your gain, Part II – or – WaMu Deathwatch Student Loan ABS: Do or do not! More bonds with high spreads and no credit risk. Revealed: the … Continue reading
Posted in remainders
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Why Citi Needs Rubin
What is it with all these Citi memos which are coming out? There was the Asia reshuffle, the Markets reshuffle, the axing of the executive committee, and now the investment bank expenses memo. The weird thing is that all of … Continue reading
Posted in banking, leadership
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What’s an Easy Way to Buy Cheap Assets?
It’s much, much bigger than regional banks buying GSE preferreds. You can buy Fannie and Freddie senior debt at significant spreads over the government which is guaranteeing it; hell, you can write credit protection on the US government and make … Continue reading
Posted in investing, personal finance
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Why do Regional Banks Hold Fannie and Freddie Preferreds?
I just saw this, from the FT: Regional banks, together with US insurers, hold the majority of Fannie and Freddie’s $36bn of outstanding preferred stock, which could be wiped out in the event of a government rescue. This is creating … Continue reading
Posted in bonds and loans
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How Big are Subprime Losses?
According to Bloomberg we truly are all subprime now: Losses and writedowns on securities related to home loans to people with poor credit now exceed $504 billion at financial institutions. This may have started as a subprime crisis, but it’s … Continue reading
Posted in banking, bonds and loans
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How Many Architects Does it Take to Build a Bank?
DealBook asked a pointed question yesterday, riffing off a WSJ article: How many investment banks does it take to run an initial public offering? Apparently it’s not only the mega-IPOs, like Visa, which are suffering from too-many-cooks syndrome: even tiny … Continue reading
Posted in architecture
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Extra Credit, Monday Edition
Risk aversion – Berkshire style: "when most people do stress tests the process is “well what happens if property prices drop 30%?” and someone says “what if they drop 40%?” and the response is – they can’t go that far. … Continue reading
Posted in remainders
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When Vikram met Jim
The scene: Vikram Pandit’s office at 399 Park Avenue. Pandit is pacing uncomfortably in front of Sandy Weill’s old fireplace. Through the door enters Jim Forese, head of Citi’s capital markets group. Pandit: Jim. Have a seat. Forese: Mr Pandit. … Continue reading
Posted in humor, leadership
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Wise Investing: No Substitute for Saving
Here’s a depressing statistic. In a recent Harris survey, 3,866 Americans were asked which things were "extremely important to achieving financial security in your retirement". 39% said that "investing wisely" was extremely important, while just 34% said that saving money … Continue reading
Posted in investing
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Ignore Stock Market Volatility
Jim Surowiecki has a great line this week, in his column on stock-market volatility: For now we’re stuck in a Yeatsian market: the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. The sentiment here is spot-on. … Continue reading
Posted in investing, stocks
5 Comments
Ben Stein Watch: August 24, 2008
Would you rather sit on an airplane than talk on a cellphone? Do you stare openly and voraciously at New Yorkers when you walk down Sixth Avenue? If your answers to both these questions are yes, then I highly recommend … Continue reading
Posted in ben stein watch
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CO2 Emission Datapoint of the Day
Barbara Kiviat reports: Over a 24-hour period, a single cargo ship sitting at Long Beach with its engines running throws off more emissions than all the passenger car traffic in the Los Angeles metro area. I’m sure that most cargo … Continue reading
Posted in climate change
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Extra Credit, Thursday Edition
U.S. Sees Biggest GDP Gain out of Major Seven OECD Countries: Which probably says more about the usefulness (or otherwise) of GDP as an indicator than it does about the relative health of the OECD nations. Quiz Question: Financial Services … Continue reading
Posted in remainders
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Status Update
I’m going to be travelling by train, plane, and foot for most of the coming week, which means that posting will be sporadic and confined to times when I have an internet connection. Still, nothing major ever happens in August, … Continue reading
Posted in Announcements
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UBS: Still Entrenched in the Art World
Count me in with Anthony Haden-Guest: for all their credit-related losses, the big private banks and wealth managers like UBS and Lehman Brothers are not going to ease up on their sponsorship of art-world events. Guest quotes a couple of … Continue reading
Posted in art, banking, private banking
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Rumor Sourcing of the Day
As Zubin will tell you, the WSJ has a favored locution when it cites anonymous sources: it likes to call them "people familiar with" the situation. The sourcing is so vague it can mean just about anything — essentially it’s … Continue reading
Posted in banking
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Polyvalent Transition Metal of the Day
If you want a leveraged play on long-term energy prices, rhenium might be a good place to look. The obscure metal has a very high melting point of 3,186°C — only tungsten’s is higher — which means that if you … Continue reading
Posted in commodities
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Leon Black: The Picasso Connection
The art world has no éminence more grise than John Richardson, art historian extraordinaire and author of an enormous biography of Picasso which, three volumes in, is still 40 (of Picasso’s) years from completion. Part of the problem is that … Continue reading
Posted in art, private equity
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Extra Credit, Wednesday Edition
Disclosure? I Call B.S.: If you knew exactly what was going to happen to CDOs back in 2006, you still wouldn’t have been able to calculate the effect on the banks. Have Economic Debates Changed Since 1977? A very funny … Continue reading
Posted in remainders
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Barack Obama, Economic Policy Wonk
David Leonhardt has a must-read piece on Barack Obama’s economic policy in this weekend’s NYT Magazine. It’s long (over 8,000 words), and even so it doesn’t tease out all the implications of, say, Obama’s 100%-auction cap-and-trade system on US fiscal … Continue reading
Posted in fiscal and monetary policy, Politics
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Rant of the Day: Daniel Davies on Afrobollocks
Poor Edmund Sanders. He writes a perfectly well-intentioned article about Ethiopia’s famine, complete with interview with prime minister Meles Zenawi, only to run into the acid pen of Dsquared: Bonus points for the mention of "the Chinese model" in a … Continue reading
Posted in development, rants
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Blurb Whore of the Day
Rachel Donadio had an entertaining essay in Sunday’s NYT Book Review on blurbing. It’s a fine art, she says: "Blurb too often, or include too many blurbs on your book, and you might get called a blurb whore." Well. I … Continue reading