Monthly Archives: February 2007

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 →

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 →