Monthly Archives: June 2007

Blackstone Deserted By Its Own Bankers

If you have seventeen different underwriters on a deal, and they all say that a certain stock is worth (say) $31 per share, there’s bound to be a pretty strong bid at that level. Right?
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News Corp-Dow Jones: It’s All Over Bar The Voting

The ink isn’t dry, but if the news
from CNBC
is to be believed, the uncertainty over the future of Dow Jones
is over.
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iPhone: Cheaper Than We Could Have Dared to Hope

It seems that AT&T is being very smart here, and offering good-value plans to iPhone buyers despite the fact that the company has a monopoly on the phone and could therefore, in theory, charge pretty much anything they wanted.
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The Return of Hans Rosling

The Hans Rosling video you’ve all been waiting for.
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The Art Trading Fund: Still Doomed to Fail

The Art Trading Fund, which seemed
like a bad idea
when we first encountered it last month, is going to officially
launch
on July 1
, reports Kit Roane. Which seems like another bad idea to me: who
launches anything on a Sunday?
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Blackstone Falls Below its Offering Price

Blackstone went public at $31 per share. It’s now trading below that, which is bad news for other private-equity shops looking to go public.
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Will China Prevent the CDO Meltdown?

If fund managers don’t look down, maybe they won’t fall.
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Posted in banking, bonds and loans, housing | Comments Off on Will China Prevent the CDO Meltdown?

How To Make $300 Million Without Really Trying

Here’s an idea. (1) Spend $7.5 million on the business.com domain name. (2) ?. (3) Profit!
The crazy thing is, it seems to have worked.
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On News, Analysis, and Charlie Gasparino

In the overheated atmosphere of CNBC, it’s easy to get confused between facts and informed speculation on those facts.
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Finance Professor Salaries

What drives biz schools’ salaries?
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Comparing Members of the $170 Billion Club

Google has caught up with Berkshire Hathaway in terms of market capitalization.
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The Fed Chairman Always Votes With the Majority

Why the need for the Fed chairman always to be in the majority? I can’t think of a single good reason, and in fact I’m having difficulty even coming up with bad reasons.
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House Prices: The Short-Covering View

If you’re a financial-market type like Paul McCulley
of Pimco, you can see the rise in demand as a short-covering
rally
: "you are born short a roof over your head," he writes,
"and must cover, either by renting or buying".
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How to Improve Mortgage Disclosures

Memo to Elizabeth
Warren
: Maybe we don’t need a strong new federal regulator, so much as we
just need better disclosure. Kenneth
Harney
has found an FTC study with some startling findings:
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Larry Summers: The Pundit Without Policies

Summers falls short of promulgating economic policies which might reduce inequality.
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Bear Stearns: Takeover Speculation Returns

Color me unconvinced for the time being: if Bear has remained independent this long, I doubt a dodgy hedge fund or two will constitute its undoing.
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Energy Markets: Insufficiently Regulated

Why regulate markets?
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Murdoch Closer to Acquiring Dow Jones

It looks very likely that we’ll see for ourselves just how hands-on Murdoch will be as an owner of the WSJ.
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Sunday Links Sparkle Like Diamonds

News and views from around the web.
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The Bear Bailout: A Plea for Transparency

Now that the public gets its financial information from an incredibly wide range of sources, it’s becoming less and less useful for banks and other financial entities to talk only to a small number of media sources.
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Elizabeth Warren on Financial Sector Regulation

A conversation with Harvard’s Elizabeth Warren.
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The JPM Ground Zero Tower: Beer Belly, or Modern Herm?

The skyscraper JP
Morgan is proposing to build at Ground Zero is hideous.
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When CEOs Don’t Meet Their Own Speechwriters

According to an anonymous
speechwriter
, CEOs can be inaccessible even to those
who are paid to write their very thoughts.
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Hedge Funds’ Insider Trading in Convertible Bonds

How do hedge funds get their outsize returns? And why do so many hedge funds
list "convertible arbitrage" as one of their main sources of profits?
Could the answer to both questions be "insider dealing"?
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The Populist Case Against Private Equity

Marc Andreessen posted a cute blog entry yesterday listing
14 questions
any prospective investor in a private-equity fund should ask
of its managers.
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