Monthly Archives: February 2008

Credit Suisse: Not a Team Player, but Profitable

Posted on February 12, 2008 by Felix

Credit Suisse reported reasonably good results, by bank standards and especially by UBS standards, this morning. But its reputation in the loan markets is taking a beating in the wake of the behavior detailed by Heidi Moore yesterday. Every time … Continue reading →

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CLOs: Yes, Let’s Panic

Posted on February 12, 2008 by Felix

Sam Jones has a good report on the CLO situation over at Alphaville. It’s bad: "80 is the new 90," he says, in terms of loan prices – which is bringing the triple-A tranches of market-value CLOs down into liquidation … Continue reading →

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Buffett’s Offer Won’t Save the Monolines

Posted on February 12, 2008 by Felix

Warren Buffett: A mensch with a triple-A rating. Just as the monoline bond insurers are melting down, he offers to ride to the rescue – for an undisclosed fee, of course – and reinsure their liabilities, solving their problems at … Continue reading →

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Extra Credit, Tuesday Edition

Posted on February 12, 2008 by Felix

Capital One offers five horrendous ideas for spending borrowed money: "What Capital One is doing here is equivalent to Anheuser-Busch sending out mailings encouraging customers to drink till they puke." Can we STOP with the Predictions? "Try and predict the … Continue reading →

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Blogonomics: Even Great Commenters Can’t Generate Wall Street Salaries

Posted on February 11, 2008 by Felix

On Saturday, Tyler Cowen posted a 62-word blog entry, of which 29 words constituted a quote from Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. It was a throwaway "fact of the day" post, comparing the cost of robberies in the United States ($525 … Continue reading →

Posted in blogonomics | 1 Comment

AIG’s Arbitrary Write-Down

Posted on February 11, 2008 by Felix

The news seems to be reasonably clear: according to an 8-K it filed today, AIG has suddenly discovered that the value of its credit default swaps is $4.88 billion lower than it had previously indicated. That’s Bloomberg’s number, and the … Continue reading →

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Banking: Words To Live By

Posted on February 11, 2008 by Felix

A Credit Suisse banker explains how his bank avoided monster losses: "All of us [banks] are really in the moving, not the storage, business." Maybe Chuck Prince and Stan O’Neal never got the memo.

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Liquidations Update: Is it Time to Panic, Yet?

Posted on February 11, 2008 by Felix

Should we be worried about collateralized loan obligations liquidating, or rather collateralized debt obligations? Alphaville has a list of liquidating CDOs which looks pretty scary to me, not that I know anything about them other than their names. Probably inchoate … Continue reading →

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Wolfers on New Hampshire and Clemens

Posted on February 11, 2008 by Felix

I had a long conversation about prediction markets and data-crunching with Justin Wolfers at the Money:Tech conference last week, which continued over the weekend via email. Given that we’re both bloggers, it seems time to bring the debate out into … Continue reading →

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Deathwatching Mainstreet.com

Posted on February 11, 2008 by Felix

Today marks the launch of mainstreet.com, a mass-market spinoff from thestreet.com. The idea behind it seems improbable: When we heard about A-Rod’s new contract with the New York Yankees, the pinstriped fans among us rejoiced and then considered, “Have we … Continue reading →

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Why Personalized Advertising Means a Free WSJ.com

Posted on February 11, 2008 by Felix

Esther Dyson has a thought-provoking op-ed in the WSJ today, which really ought to be read by the paper’s new owner, Rupert Murdoch. "The Coming Ad Revolution" is the headline, and a close reader of the piece will immediately understand … Continue reading →

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Beware the Market-Value CLO

Posted on February 11, 2008 by Felix

The WSJ does a very good job this morning of bringing us all up to speed on the latest developments in the world of the credit crunch. I have a feeling we’ll be hearing more about these "market-value CLOs," creatures … Continue reading →

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Extra Credit, Monday Edition

Posted on February 11, 2008 by Felix

Does This Profile Make Me Look Fat? The Epicurean Dealmaker on Steve Schwarzman. Money:Tech and the myth of Open: "Even the SEC, whose purpose of late is solely ensuring that price sensitive information is shared freely to all, takes the … Continue reading →

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Ben Stein Watch: February 10, 2008

Posted on February 10, 2008 by Felix

One of the more subtly irritating things about Ben Stein’s NYT column is the fact that he seems so cavalier and ungrateful about the fact that he has such an influential pulpit from which to broadcast his biweekly blather. The … Continue reading →

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The Restaurant Pretentiousness Ratio

Posted on February 10, 2008 by Felix

After flicking through the wine list at Cafe Gray on Friday night, I’ve come up with what I’m calling the Restaurant Pretentiousness Ratio, or RPR. The formula is simple: RPR=W/E W is what you might call the quarter-median wine price: … Continue reading →

Posted in Not economics | 2 Comments

Extra Credit, Weekend Edition

Posted on February 9, 2008 by Felix

House introduces ‘Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights’ Social networking traffic growth model: "Examining the empirical evidence on social network traffic, I have formulated a new theory: Social network traffic grows exponentially for about two years, and then follows a random … Continue reading →

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Credit Card Datapoint of the Day

Posted on February 8, 2008 by Felix

Jonathan Stempel reports: Discover Financial Services said on Thursday it agreed to sell its Goldfish credit card unit in Britain to Barclays Plc for $70 million, abandoning a money-losing business it bought two years ago for $1.68 billion, as consumer … Continue reading →

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Why Non-Borrowed Reserves Don’t Matter

Posted on February 8, 2008 by Felix

Caroline Baum does everybody a favor today and explains why you shouldn’t be remotely worried about a deservedly-obscure indicator known as non-borrowed reserves. She talks about the "hysterical emails" she’s been getting on the subject but is too polite to … Continue reading →

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Exxon Mobil Plays Hardball With Venezuela

Posted on February 8, 2008 by Felix

Did you have any idea that the bonds of PDVSA, the Venezuelan state oil company, are trading at just 65.7 cents on the dollar? I didn’t, but are now, partly because of an injunction that Exxon Mobil has managed to … Continue reading →

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The Future of the Monolines

Posted on February 8, 2008 by Felix

Andrew Clavell has a really good blog entry on the monolines today, even as MBIA somehow managed to sell $700 million in new equity in the public markets, over and above the $300 million it sold to Warburg Pincus. (Which … Continue reading →

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Monoline Tsunami Aimed at European Banks

Posted on February 8, 2008 by Felix

If you skim over headlines in your RSS reader, it’s easy to miss this one: "Ackermann warns of monoline ‘tsunami’". Ackman is bearish on monolines? Wake me up when you have something new to – oh. It’s not Bill Ackman … Continue reading →

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Some Things I Learned from James Stewart’s Steve Schwarzman Profile

Posted on February 8, 2008 by Felix

It’s long, so you might want to skip the whole thing. Here are some juicy bits: Schwarzman also owns a coastal estate in Saint-Tropez and a beachfront property in Jamaica. He typically spends summer weekends and August in East Hampton; … Continue reading →

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The Public Side of Gerson Lehrman

Posted on February 8, 2008 by Felix

Apologies for the late start this morning, I’ve had a combination of digital and meatspace problems (I thought I was taking an aspirin in the middle of the night; it turned out to be an ambien. Oops.) But one thing … Continue reading →

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Justin Wolfers is $20 Richer

Posted on February 7, 2008 by Felix

I found myself in the middle of an interesting debate between Barry Ritholtz and Justin Wolfers this afternoon. Barry was advocating the idea of trend-following, when it comes to stocks, while Justin is more of a believer in the random … Continue reading →

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Blogonomics: How Gerson Lehrman Pays Bloggers

Posted on February 7, 2008 by Felix

Call it the monetization of opacity. One of the biggest buzz topics of the Money:Tech conference is dark pools: the way that stock trades are migrating away from open and transparent public exchanges, and into black boxes which don’t make … Continue reading →

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