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Search Results for: results
Crazy Ecuador
A couple of major developments on the Ecuador front: yesterday, finance minister Elsa Viteri came out with the rather stunning decision that the country would make the coupon payments on its 2015 global bonds — despite deciding to default on … Continue reading
Posted in bonds and loans, emerging markets
1 Comment
Can We Really Guide the Economy?
Ryan Avent says that he thinks the "plausible range of economic outcomes is, at the moment, quite wide indeed", and wonders whether "the size of this conceivable range is actually reflective of potential outcomes, rather than simple ignorance": If it … Continue reading
Posted in economics, fiscal and monetary policy
2 Comments
Extra Credit, Tuesday Edition
How to tackle foreclosures and unemployment at the same time: Get some desperately-needed empirical data on loan mods. Doing the Math to Find the Good Jobs: Mathematicians have the top three best jobs. Economists are in 11th place, just ahead … Continue reading
Posted in remainders
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What Does GMAC’s Bond-Exchange Failure Mean for Detroit?
The GMAC bond-exchange results are out, and the screws that GMAC applied on December 10 — tender your bonds or we won’t become a bank or get TARP funds — seem to have had some effect, with the percentage of … Continue reading
Posted in bankruptcy, bonds and loans
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Dubious Statistics of the Day, Toxic Mortgage Edition
Interest and pressure groups put out garbage masquerading as useful research on a daily basis; it’s the job of the press to recongnise it as such and ignore it. Most of the time, the press does a very good job … Continue reading
Posted in housing, journalism, statistics
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GMAC, the Fed, and Moral Hazard
The GMAC announcement on December 10 was quite unambiguous. The headline alone told you everything you needed to know: GMAC Announces That the Results of Its Exchange Offers Are Insufficient To Meet Regulatory Capital Requirements To Become a Bank Holding … Continue reading
Posted in bailouts
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A Victory for GMAC Holdouts?
It looks like anybody who refused to participate in the GMAC bond tender offer is going to end up feeling pretty smug: The U.S. Treasury said it will purchase a $5 billion stake in GMAC LLC, the financing arm of … Continue reading
Posted in bailouts, bonds and loans
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Can GMAC Lose its Newfound Bank Status?
GMAC says it’s still "tabulating" the results of its bond exchange, which means we still don’t know whether the crucial 75% hurdle has been reached. If it isn’t, then what? On Friday morning, the answer was clear: The deadline for … Continue reading
The Rise of Cheap Airlines
BreakingViews has launched its Poor Getting Poorer index, complete with predictable members such as Walmart and pawnbrokers EZCorp. But there’s also JetBlue: Though leisure travel will take a hit, discount carriers like JetBlue will attract those willing to take 3 … Continue reading
Posted in travel
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The Limited Usefulness of Shared-Equity Mortgages
Paul Kedrosky pleads: I’d be delighted if someone would explain to me why we aren’t talking more seriously about shared equity home mortgages in the U.S. The answer is very simple, I think: the perceived cost to the borrower of … Continue reading
Posted in housing
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Madoff’s Volatility
A longtime reader of this blog got himself Bernie Madoff’s return series from a Fairfield Sentry marketing document and plugged it into an Excel spreadsheet; he then graphed the one-year rolling volatility of Madoff’s returns. The results are interesting: click … Continue reading
Posted in fraud
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Goldman Starts Getting Smaller
Thanks to the tactical leak to the WSJ a couple of weeks ago, today’s Goldman Sachs results are not particularly surprising, even if they are genuinely atrocious. And it’s also not news that all of the losses came from the … Continue reading
Posted in banking
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Homeownership Makes You Fat and Unhappy
Grace Wong dived deep into a survey of 809 women in Columbus, Ohio, in 2005 — before the property bubble burst — and came up with some startling results: An interesting portrait of homeowners emerges from my analysis. I find … Continue reading
Posted in housing
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How to Deal With GM’s Bondholders?
If the comments on my GMAC bond entry earlier this morning are any indication, it’s going to be harder than I think a lot of people anticipate to bail in GM’s bondholders as part of any government bailout. Here’s three: … Continue reading
Posted in bailouts, bonds and loans
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Finding Holes in the TARP
Elizabeth Warren is on the warpath. As chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with making sure TARP expenditures make sense, she’s going to be scathing, according to the WSJ, when she presents her first findings to the House today. … Continue reading
Posted in bailouts
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Why Elizabeth Warren is an Inspired Choice to Oversee TARP
Tom Brown has a peculiar column today taking issue with the inspired choice of Elizabeth Warren to chair the panel overseeing the TARP program. The problem, in his eyes, is that Warren is a fighter for consumers, rather than banks. … Continue reading
Posted in bailouts, banking, regulation
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Jim Simons’s Incentives
Why would anybody invest with Jim Simons? Everybody knows where his love and attention and money is concentrated: in the $8 billion Medallion Fund, which charges 5-and-44 but which in any case is closed to outside investment and basically just … Continue reading
Posted in hedge funds
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Pricing Parking in Chicago
Barbara Kiviat understands, I think, why Chicago sold off its parking meters on the cheap: Chicago hadn’t raised rates on some of its meters in 20 years–there’s a lot of value to be had by the person who doesn’t fear … Continue reading
Posted in cities
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This is Not Financial Meltdown
Is this the low point of the crisis so far? From the stock market’s point of view, yes, it is. And the numbers coming out of the Treasury market would certainly seem to imply a flight to quality of unprecedented … Continue reading
Watches: Don’t Trust the Auctions
Of all the weird alternative asset classes to be invested in, could watches have been one of the best? A 1963 Patek Philippe just sold at Christie’s in Geneva for $800,000 — a record for a yellow-gold watch. But as … Continue reading
Posted in auctions, consumption
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Art Auctions: The End of Seller’s Rebates
I wonder whether Edward Dolman is one of those people who, long after they’ve left home, casually drop into a conversation with their parents that they’ve stopped smoking cigarettes — having never admitted, in the prior years, that they were … Continue reading
Icelandic CDS Datapoints of the Day
The CDS auctions for Iceland’s failed banks are all over now, and the results are up at creditfixings.com. Bank Inside Market Midpoint Open interest Final price Landsbanki senior 3.375 €454 million to sell 1.25 Landsbanki subordinated 1.375 €63 million to … Continue reading
Posted in derivatives, iceland
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Art: The Prints Market Crumbles
It’s hard to judge the state of the art market by looking at auction results of unique paintings, precisely because they’re unique and you can always make an argument about why this or that particular painting did or didn’t sell … Continue reading
Posted in art
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The Bleak Christie’s Sale
Christie’s had a big impressionist-and-modern sale last night, and the results, in Carol Vogel’s headline, were bleak. All the biggest-ticket pieces failed to sell, with a Rothko estimated at $20 million to $30 million being passed after not even getting … Continue reading
Posted in art
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Country Risk Datapoints of the Day
Here’s the kind of table most of us never thought we’d see, taken from Merrill Lynch’s latest economics note: The rankings are constructed by considering the biggest risk factors affecting countries today: current account financing gap, FX reserves/short-term external debt … Continue reading
Posted in economics, emerging markets
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