Category Archives: Portfolio

The hedge-fund managers with 10-figure annual incomes.
Continue reading →

In which Felix’s hard drive fails, and he blames the Blog.
Continue reading →

Will Barclays pay with non-voting shares? Might RBS sell Banco Real? If so, who would buy it?
Continue reading →

Blackstone, or KKR, or Silver Lake, or someone along those lines, should just buy Goldman already. People have been talking about the first $100 billion private-equity deal for some time now – and this could be it.
Continue reading →

It’s taken five months, and the fat lady (a/k/a Sydney-based Perpetual Investments) hasn’t sung quite yet, but it very much looks as though Mexican cement company Cemex has finally snagged Rinker.
Continue reading →

Ontario Teachers Pension Plan seems to have decided it’s going to make its own bid for BCE (a/k/a Bell Canada). Private-equity shops such as Providence Equity Partners might be invited to join the buyout party, but then again so are real-money investors such as Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
Continue reading →

Gordon Hanson is causing quite a stir with his study for the Council on Foreign Relations entitled “The Economic Logic of Illegal Immigration”. (Press release, WSJ op-ed, abstract, paper.) Economically speaking, he concludes, there’s really very little reason to believe that legal immigration is preferable to illegal immigration – and illegal immigration has a small but positive net economic effect.

Continue reading →

Brad Setser notes that Brazil just issued a new 10-year bond at 122bp over Treasuries. “I remember when…” he writes – I’ll finish the sentence for him – “Brazil was at 2,400bp over Treasuries”. The official JP Morgan Brazil index now stands at 164bp over.

Chase wants its borrowers to pony up $295 plus $5.42 per month for the privilege of paying down their mortgage more quickly. “Only a bank would figure out a way to charge you for something you can do yourself and make you think it’s a smart decision!”

The NYT’s flash-based executive compensation chart, nicking its look-and-feel from Gapminder.

Continue reading →

Can you really buy default protection and yet pay absolutely nothing if nobody defaults?
Continue reading →

There’s a lot of muttering in Washington about legislation to reign in predatory subprime lenders. (And yes, you’d be right in thinking that that horse bolted long ago.) Much more useful would be legislation to reduce the income-tax consequences of short sales.
Continue reading →

Sam Zell seems to want to set up a Tribune vs Google fight. That’s just stupid.
Continue reading →

There are many flavors of SRI, and investors can and should be able to choose between them.
Continue reading →

Reducing the number of banks has no adverse impact on the number of bank branches, but would help address the present regulatory nightmare.
Continue reading →

New York magazine loves its special issues, and this week it’s alighted on hedge funds. The conceit is “Behind the Hedge,” which is illustrated with a picture of… a guy behind a hedge. Really. Is there anything new or interesting here? Not that I can see. But if you’re looking for contrarian indicators, this issue could be a good sign of the beginning of the end of the hedge-fund craze.

Continue reading →

How to use leverage to boost earnings.
Continue reading →

Three of the four named potential successors to Citi CEO Chuck Prince, including Vikram Pandit, are investment bankers at heart.
Continue reading →

An article in Newsweek says that microcredit doesn’t work. It does.
Continue reading →

The New York Times runs a chart showing payrolls going down, not up.
Continue reading →

Are “free trade” agreements like the recent one with South Korea really trade-for-security agreements?
Continue reading →

The consequence of a boom in biofuels is likely to be more of the world’s poor going hungry.
Continue reading →

A big jobs report on a day when most of the market has the day off.
Continue reading →

Daimler will probably be left with unfunded Chrysler healthcare liabilities even after any sale.
Continue reading →

In the wake of New Century’s bankruptcy, Robert Lindsay gets his hands on the official list of the company’s biggest creditors. At the top of the list is Goldman Sachs, followed by Credit Suisse and a who’s-who of other big investment-banking names.
Continue reading →

DaimlerChrysler CEO Deiter Zetsche‘s foremost obligation is to his shareholders, and he is going to have a devil of a time explaining why it’s leaving billions of dollars on the table just because Kirk Kerkorian is a nice guy.
Continue reading →

What Felix learned at lunch with the author of Fooled by Randomness and the forthcoming The Black Swan.
Continue reading →