Monthly Archives: April 2007

Wolfowitz Must Go

L’affair Wolfowitz has been trickling out for some time now, but today I think it finally reached the point at which Paul Wolfowitz can quite clearly no longer lead the World Bank effectively. When you read the report of the … Continue reading

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There’s No Housing Bubble

Chart of the day comes from Deloitte’s Carl Steidtmann. You wanna see what a bubble looks like? He’ll show you what a bubble looks like.

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Pastorini vs Gold Fields: The Plot Thickens

Gold Fields is on the record as saying that it has received no bid, but at the same time Gold Fields executives are leaking the details of the bid to Bloomberg…
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Mr McDade’s Inexplicable Insouciance

Dan Loeb strikes again.
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There’s No Housing Bubble

Chart of the day comes from Deloitte’s Carl Steidtmann. You wanna see what a bubble looks like? He’ll show you what a bubble looks like. There’s much more where that came from, and of course the comparison isn’t really fair: … Continue reading

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Pastorini vs Gold Fields: The Plot Thickens

In the FT vs Bloomberg stakes, it’s looking increasingly as though the score is 1-0 to the Brits: Bloomberg put out a follow-up article yesterday headlined “Gold Fields Takeover Interest Can’t Be Verified”, and today’s New York Times quotes Bloomberg … Continue reading

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Mr McDade’s Inexplicable Insouciance

Ya gotta love Dan Loeb. Just check out his letter to the board of directors of PDL Biopharma, a biotech company he owns stock in, which is well worth reading in full. Most of it is a full-on broadside directed … Continue reading

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Goldman Traders Make the Top-Paid List

The Goldman traders who make more money than CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
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Vonage Back Under Citron’s Control

Vonage founder Jeffrey Citron kicks out CEO Mike Snyder.
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Goldman Traders Make the Top-Paid List

There was much press a couple of days ago when Trader Monthly announced that the top five earners on its top traders listing all brought home more than $1 billion last year. (Of course, “brought home” is a really stupid … Continue reading

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Vonage Back Under Citron’s Control

Last year, Vonage founder Jeffrey Citron wanted to take his company public. The problem was, he’d been indicted for securites fraud back in 2003, in a case surrounding his previous company, Datek Securities. So he needed someone else to be … Continue reading

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Stern, Sachs, and Stiglitz on the Economics of Climate Change

Why we should spend money now to make rich future generations even richer.
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Stern, Sachs, and Stiglitz on the Economics of Climate Change

If you read my entry from last night, you’ll know I went to a discussion on climate change at Columbia yesterday, which was kicked off with a presentation from the man himself, Sir Nicholas Stern of the Stern Review on … Continue reading

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Why New York City Property Is Only Going Up

New York City is a unique property market, which can and will continue to appreciate even if the rest of the US sees a significant slowdown.
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Why New York City Property Is Only Going Up

Let me stick my neck out on the future direction of housing prices in the US. I think that we’re in the middle of a mildly chaotic move from a pretty flat price distribution to one which looks much more … Continue reading

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Pay Scale, fine dining edition

How much New York’s top restaurants pay.
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Pay Scale, fine dining edition

There are few stories as popular as the ones ogling the multimillion-dollar paychecks of the business and finance honchos who eat at swanky New York eateries such as Balthazar and Telepan. I wonder what those masters of the universe would … Continue reading

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How home prices can be steady even if median home prices fall

It’s a well-known fact that the average new-home size has been growing steadily for years, and positively booming of late. So if those new homes bear the brunt of the slowdown, and are sold in much lower numbers, that could do nasty things to the median sales price even if any given existing home doesn’t fall in value at all. The new homes don’t even need to be sold at a lower price, there just needs to be fewer sales.
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FT vs Bloomberg

The FT’s Alphaville blog has come out and declared that one of Bloomberg’s biggest stories today is a hoax.
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How home prices can be steady even if median home prices fall

The lead headline on CNNMoney.com right now is “Home prices headed for historic drop”: we’re told this will be “the first annual decline in nearly 40 years of tracking.” The headline comes in response to news from the National Association … Continue reading

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FT vs Bloomberg

Ooh, this is juicy! The FT’s Alphaville blog has come out and declared that one of Bloomberg’s biggest stories today is a hoax. The story, headlined “Gold Fields May Receive Bid From Pastorini-Led Group,” is very long, very detailed, and … Continue reading

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Kerkorian: Out of the running for Chrysler?

Bloomberg’s Doron Levin gets off a nice one-liner at Kirk Kerkorian today, and his bid for Chrysler – which, as you’ll recall, is contingent on the United Auto Workers taking on a huge chunk of Chrysler’s liabilities and risk. The bid, he says,

is a bit like proposing a manned mission to Pluto, subject to the invention of a spaceship that can traverse the solar system.

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Kerkorian: Out of the running for Chrysler?

Bloomberg’s Doron Levin gets off a nice one-liner at Kirk Kerkorian today, and his bid for Chrysler — which, as you’ll recall, is contingent on the United Auto Workers taking on a huge chunk of Chrysler’s liabilities and risk. The … Continue reading

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Citigroup layoff math

Citigroup’s New York payrolls will only fall by 6% – which is less than the corporate average.
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The NYT’s rent vs buy calculations

David Leonhardt’s Economix column has finally been promoted from the front of the Business section to the main front page! Congratulations to him. And the subject matter is dear to my own heart: rent vs buy calculations. In fact, by far the best thing about the article is the online rent vs buy calculator – bookmark it, and use it whenever you or your friends are thinking of buying a place. It’s great.

Given his space constraints, one can forgive Leonhardt not going into gruesome detail about all the different variables which go into such calculations. But I would still take issue with a large chunk of how his story is framed.

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