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Author Archives: Felix
Extra Credit, Friday Edition
Woods Fund Takes a Beating: "This year, the hedge fund was down about 77% through July, which comes on top of a roughly 34% decline last year." Traffic Safety Update: The roads are getting significantly safer — unless you’re a … Continue reading
Posted in remainders
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Dan Loeb’s Terrace
The main reason to read Paul Goldberger’s article on 15 Central Park West in the new Vanity Fair is for the photos. Here are the developers, posed under the arches on the balcony of the top-floor penthouse — which I … Continue reading
Posted in architecture, hedge funds
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Missed Connections, UN-Russia Edition
Don’t feel bad, Carl Icahn. Remember when you couldn’t get Steve Ballmer on the blower? Well, it happens to the best of us: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has so far been unable to contact Russian President Dmitry Medvedev by telephone … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
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Good News for Monolines Wanting to Settle their CDO Obligations
Whenever a debt issuer runs into distress, it’s a safe bet that there will be legal tussles between holders of junior and senior notes. CDOs are no exception, as Aline van Duyn reports today in the FT. But it turns … Continue reading
Posted in bonds and loans, insurance, law
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A Torrid Tale of Love, Lies, and Collateralized Debt Obligations
Robin Kane might be winning the financial mixed-metaphor contest, but when it comes to tortured similes, Ray Pasimio has the competition truly beat. Ladies and gentlemen, the worthy recipient of a Dishonorable Mention in the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest: Carey, … Continue reading
Posted in humor
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How Unregulated Interior Design Destroyed Contemporary Cinema
Alex Tabarrok takes aim at the American Society of Interior Designers: As Carpenter and Ross point out in an excellent article in Regulation from which I have drawn: In more than 30 years of advocating for regulation, the ASID and … Continue reading
Posted in regulation
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GDP Statistics and the 2008 Election
Is it weird to link to Dean Baker three times over the course of three successive blog entries? Not when he comes out with stuff like this: It is very likely that the third quarter GDP number will be negative. … Continue reading
Posted in economics, Politics, statistics
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A Brief History of Home Equity Loans
Louise Story has an excellent history of the home equity loan on the front page of today’s NYT. She talks a lot about the explosion in such products — outstandings rose a thousandfold, to $1 trillion, from the early 1980s … Continue reading
Posted in banking, housing, personal finance
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The Rise of Medical Tourism
Dean Baker has long complained that when American journalists and policymakers talk about "free trade" they don’t think to include trade in things like medical care — the price of which could be brought down substantially if foreign-trained doctors were … Continue reading
Posted in healthcare
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Incentives for Inflation
Steve Waldman explains that America’s net-debtor position (both at the sovereign and at the individual level) means that there’s a lot of pressure towards inflation: Inflation helps debtors at the expense of creditors. In democracies where those who can vote … Continue reading
Posted in fiscal and monetary policy
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Extra Credit, Thursday Edition
Macroblog returns: Yay! The first new post dives straight in to the subject of monetary policy over the past year. Random Observations about the US and/or the Clemson Area: Through the eyes of a recently-arrived Romanian. Alex Kummant, National Stationmaster: … Continue reading
Posted in remainders
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When Markets Break
How do you know that markets are broken? Sometimes it’s the presence of a clean arbitrage like that in Thomson Reuters shares. But there’s a much bigger weirdness going on right now: as John Carney reports, the spread on long-dated … Continue reading
Posted in bonds and loans, hedge funds, humor, stocks
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Bringing Back Regulation’s Good Name
Jesse Eisinger’s column this month is about the different regulatory structures in London and New York, and how they both failed. I asked him about it: Jesse, you travelled to London for your latest column, and came away with the … Continue reading
Posted in regulation
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The Vocation of Leadership
According to Dan Hesse, the CEO of Sprint, leadership is a vocation, and he’s certainly not doing it for the money. Kevin Maney asked him why he took the job, and he gave a very long answer. Here’s a chopped-down … Continue reading
Posted in leadership
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Who’s Buying Financials?
What adjective would you use to describe someone who kept on buying bank stocks even as they fell and fell and fell? I’m not sure if there’s a word in English for "someone who doesn’t learn from his mistakes", but … Continue reading
Learning Lessons from Auction Rate Securities
Back in February, James Stewart, an investor in auction-rate preferred shares, complained that those shares were illiquid and that he was having difficulty accessing his money. He reckoned that if he couldn’t get his money out of the closed-end fund … Continue reading
Posted in bonds and loans, investing, personal finance
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Apple vs Google
Apple is worth more than Google. Huh? This doesn’t make sense to me. Let’s start with the obvious: Google makes more money than Apple does. It had earnings of $10 billion over the past 12 months, compared to $8 billion … Continue reading
Posted in stocks, technology
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Laughing at Alan Greenspan
I’m no big fan of Alan Greenspan or his pronouncements, especially those where he tries to persuade us that he wasn’t wrong in the past, he was right. There’s a classic example in his latest interview with David Wessel: In … Continue reading
Posted in fiscal and monetary policy, housing, immigration
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The Curious Thomson Reuters Share-Price Arbitrage
Does anybody out there still believe in the efficient markets hypothesis? If so, I disprove it thus. Thomson Reuters is listed both in the UK and in the US. As CEO Tom Glocer says, "a share in one place is … Continue reading
Nassim Taleb and the Ubiquity of Moral Hazard
Nassim Taleb would be the first to tell you that the runaway success of his books was an utterly unpredictable black swan event. You might or might not believe him — but in his interview today with Lloyd Grove, there’s … Continue reading
Posted in economics
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Selling Iowa’s Pollock
After the University of Iowa was severely damaged by floods in June, a novel way of paying for the damage was mooted: selling Mural, the great Pollock in the university’s art museum. It didn’t take long for arts blogger Tyler … Continue reading
Keeping Your Eggs in Many FDIC-Insured Baskets
The Grouse is hearing portentious rumblings: I am told that a loan trader at one investment bank is all in cash and has his wife running around opening savings accounts at various banks so that his money will be covered … Continue reading
Posted in personal finance
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Extra Credit, Wednesday Edition
Statistics, damned statistics and value added: John Kay on the uselessness of many official statistics. Insolvent versus profoundly insolvent – Fannie Mae Part II: "If the shortfall at Fannie is more than 78 billion then Fannie is ‘profoundly insolvent’. It … Continue reading
Posted in remainders
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Money-Market Datapoint of the Day
Vikas Bajaj reports: Money market funds, the short-term cash alternatives, grew to $2.9 trillion in June, up from $2.1 trillion a year ago, according to Crane Data. Those funds, in turn, have more than tripled their holdings of Treasuries and … Continue reading
Posted in bonds and loans
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Pulchritude Datapoint of the Day
Steve Levitt reports: Mixed-race kids do have one advantage over white and black kids: the mixed-race kids are much more attractive on average. The paper quantifies: Mixed race adolescents are rated as .41 standard deviations more attractive than white children, … Continue reading
Posted in demographics
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