Monthly Archives: February 2008

Vale Sees its Loan Spreads Gap Out

Posted on February 5, 2008 by Felix

Yesterday, I applauded – on both sides – Merrill Lynch’s departure from the team raising money to fund Vale’s $90 billion takeover bid for Xstrata. This morning, I got my daily email from Latin Finance (highly recommended, sign up here, … Continue reading →

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Extra Credit, Tuesday Edition

Posted on February 5, 2008 by Felix

Better Than Free: "I think ads are only one of the paths that attention takes, and in the long-run, they will only be part of the new ways money is made selling the free." The Financial Times Says That Bankers … Continue reading →

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Obama vs Clinton: The International Perspective

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Felix

Moldbug thinks he’s being cynical: I would go with Obama, and here’s why. First, the election of Obama makes the transformation of the President into the pontifex maximus of the Potomac much clearer. The Democrats are the party of the … Continue reading →

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Superbowl Ads as Sell Signals

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Felix

When I saw that an ad for E*Trade Bank had made Jeff Bercovici’s top six ads of the Superbowl, I thought I’d do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. The ad is for the E*Trade savings account, so I thought I’d take … Continue reading →

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Is M&A Decoupling From Lending?

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Felix

Would that this sort of thing happened much more often: Vale, the world’s second-largest mining group, has fired Merrill Lynch as one of its two lead advisers after the investment bank decided not to help finance a potential $90bn takeover … Continue reading →

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The Past-Due Loan Problem at American Express

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Felix

Right now the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 86.16 points, and American Express is down $1.51 per share. Given that the DJIA divisor is 0.123017848, that means American Express is responsible for 12.27 points of the Dow’s 86-point fall, … Continue reading →

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Goldman Gets its Yahoo-Microsoft Mandate

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Felix

Goldman Sachs didn’t lose any time getting itself a mandate in the Yahoo-Microsoft merger. Goldman advised Microsoft in its attempt to buy Yahoo last year, but wasn’t hired by the Redmond giant this time around. Not to worry: Goldman has … Continue reading →

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Why Infrastructure isn’t a Bubble

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Felix

Kit Roane has a weirdly bearish piece on infrastructure investment today, looking at it from the point of view of pension funds and bemoaning the fact that they can no longer get predictably high returns on any deal they like. … Continue reading →

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Mankiw Mathematics

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Felix

Greg Mankiw isn’t interested in running the NBER; David Warsh explains why. It isn’t that the NBER job pays badly: the current occupant of the job, Martin Feldstein, earns $600,000 in salary, with another $151,000 in benefits, on top of … Continue reading →

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Inflation Expectations: Less Worrying Than They Seem

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Felix

Anonymous econoblogger knzn has done a great job of moving the inflation-expectations story forwards with a blog entry actually looking at where Greg Ip’s numbers might be coming from. The reason for looking at inflation expectations between 2013 and 2018 … Continue reading →

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The Unedifying Google-Microsoft Fight

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Felix

Herb Greenberg is unimpressed with the spectacle of Google lumbering in to the Microsoft-Yahoo ring, trying to spoil the deal before it happens. "The irony is obvious," he says. "So is the arrogance of Google." Maybe it was simply nice … Continue reading →

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Facebook Notification of the Day

Posted on February 2, 2008 by Felix
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Extra Credit, Weekend Edition

Posted on February 2, 2008 by Felix

The corporate slogan of the month award goes to … Oxford Funding Corp: Nothing like putting the word "meltdown" in your slogan. The competitive advantage of cash in the bank Research Roundup: Monoline Update Worker at Lazard’s Atria Reacts to … Continue reading →

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How Google is Like a Hedge Fund

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Felix

Big stand-alone hedge funds generally did well in 2007; hedge funds owned by investment banks, by contrast, did much worse. I can’t help but see an analogy here: Microsoft is bringing Yahoo in-house, to compete with the big stand-alone Google. … Continue reading →

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Harry Macklowe Takes a Bath

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Felix

How much money has New York property magnate Harry Macklowe lost over the past year? Jennifer Forsyth in the WSJ says that it’s more than $2 billion, although it’s not obvious where she’s getting her numbers from. Mish is more … Continue reading →

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Chart of the Day: Inflation Expectations

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Felix

Greg Ip passes along this chart of long-term inflation expectations, which are now hitting new highs. The chart shows something called the "5yr-5yr forward breakeven" – what the market expects inflation to average over the five years from 2013 to … Continue reading →

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The Unusual Suspects

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Felix

It’s like something out of a movie: a bunch of misfits with nothing much in common are thrown together in an attempt to pull off a massive heist – or acquisition of a monoline insurance company, at least. According to … Continue reading →

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Goldman Loses Microsoft Mandate

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Felix

Which banks did Microsoft mandate to put together its monster $44 billion bid for Yahoo? Morgan Stanley – and Blackstone! This is a huge loss for Goldman Sachs, which advised Microsoft in its failed attempt to buy Yahoo last year. … Continue reading →

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Payrolls: There’s More Rate Cuts Coming

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Felix

I got a sad email from a friend at Morgan Stanley yesterday, talking of the hundreds of employees who were "marched out of the building" at 9:15 in the morning, part (one assumes) of the previously-announced headcount reduction. Morgan Stanley, … Continue reading →

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Microsoft-Yahoo: It’s On

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Felix

OK, never mind payrolls. There’s only one story this morning: Microsoft buying Yahoo – a deal which seems set to send not only Yahoo shares but the entire stock market north. Why would shares in automakers rally on a technology … Continue reading →

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Extra Credit, Friday Edition

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Felix

Subprime Lenders Get Big Accounting Break at SEC: Jonathan Weil is fisked by Paul Jackson and Tanta. The Dirty Little Secret behind ETFs: Tracking errors as large as 478bp. And you know they’re never in the investor’s favor. Ratings agency … Continue reading →

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