Category Archives: Econoblog

I got an email from one Ed Grebeck this morning, complaining about a post of mine on the subject of CDOs. It started like this: Felix, I teach “Credit Default Swaps 101” at NYU, a strategist in the global debt … Continue reading →

(Cross-posted from Market Movers) The World Business Forum is a two-day event; I only made the second afternoon. But even that was enough to almost make my head explode. I knew in theory that there’s an almost insatiable appetite for … Continue reading →

I’ve found out of late that not everybody reads my website through RSS, and there are actually people who don’t know that the reason I’m barely blogging here is that I’m blogging as much as ten times per day over … Continue reading →

It’s live! Up until now, I’ve been crossposting to felixsalmon.com, but now that portfolio.com has finally been unveiled to the world, you’ll have to go there to read most of my finance blogs. You can always get there by going … Continue reading →

Anil Dash has a wonderful piece of contrarian thinking up on his blog — it’s actually a week old, but it’s really timeless. A little while ago, my friend Michael Sippey, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing the other … Continue reading →

The only thing better than writing blog entries about how Goldman Sachs should be taken private? Having a journalist from the London Evening Standard phone up a Goldman flack and ask for a response. Genius.

The New York Post has a wonderfully gossipy piece by Paul Tharp today on who might take over at Citigroup if and when Chuck Prince gets the boot. Tharp concentrates on the fight between Vikram Pandit and Robert Druskin, which … Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

To read all the press about the Citigroup layoff plan of late, it seems there are two main planks: first, fire about 17,000 people. Then take another 10,000 jobs or so, and move them out of New York to cheaper … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

Add Michael Bloomberg to the billion-dollar-a-year club. DealBook reports that Fortune’s Carol Loomis has had an inside look at the books, and found 2006 profits of $1.5 billion on revenues of $4.7 billion. Given that Bloomberg personally owns more than … Continue reading →

One reason why energy traders can make $2 billion in a year is that energy prices are crazy, crazy things — they often behave more like hotel rooms than like normal assets like stocks or bonds or 2-bedroom apartments. Back … Continue reading →