Category Archives: Portfolio

The SEC says it wants to move to a principles-based approach to regulation – but then says that doing so means “striking a balance” when it comes to investor protection.
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Ford’s CEO has a contract which allows his “wife, children, and friends” to use the company jet for personal reasons at company expense, “when he requests it”.
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The IMF seems sanguine about spillover from the US to the rest of the world. But beware financial linkages!
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Dissecting a National Geographic chart.
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Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman is about to officially become a multigazillionaire, once his company goes public and everybody knows what his stake is worth. But in the public mind, will he really have overtaken Henry Kravis as the ne plus ultra of private-equity honchos? Maybe not. What he really needs is not more money, or more lavish parties; he needs to do something which will connect him to the entire country. You know, like buy Detroit.
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Argentines have always loved strong leaders, from Peron to Menem. Kirchner’s only the latest in a long line, and if he can keep control of the economy – a very big if – then he and his wife could be running Argentina more or less indefinitely.
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The General Motors Building, at 767 Fifth Avenue, is the most valuable building in the world.
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Can you remember a week of late in which Australia’s Macquarie didn’t buy something?
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Credit spreads in general are likely to widen out in the wake of the mortgage mess. Or, you could describe the same thing as credit spreads in general widening out in the wake of the French presidential election, or in the wake of the appointment of Felix Salmon to a blogging gig at Portfolio. Causation is a hard thing to demonstrate – which means that containment, as a concept, has relatively little utility.
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Will commercial mortgages of the 2007 vintage turn out to be as misguided as residential mortgages in 2006? Fitch Ratings thinks there’s a serious risk of that. Does this sound familiar to you?

The phenomenon has granted borrowers easy access to capital and prompted the development of new, more highly leveraged debt structures.

Fitch said properties were also increasingly financed with no money down or even with loans for more than 100 per cent of a property’s value as owners borrowed greater amounts upfront to pay interest costs.

Commercial property certainly seems healthy at the moment. But that won’t last forever. I’m frankly surprised, given what we’ve learned about the residential mortgages being written this time last year, that banks haven’t tightened up at all on their commercial-property underwriting standards.

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$40 million seems to be the going rate for an investment-bank CEO these days. Might highly-paid traders be part of the reason why?
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Blackstone’s IPO is going to be double the size of Google’s. But it’s still tiny compared to ICBC.
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Subscribers to the New York Times got an extra section to throw away unread this morning: DealBook, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s M&A-obsessed blog, now has a quarterly spin-off on paper, with full-page ads from companies you’ve never heard of like MacKenzie Partners and Innisfree, who will help you out when an activist investor starts waging a proxy war against your company. After all, if takeover bids are booming, then the business of defending against takeover bids must be booming too!
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The departure of Peter Scaturro bodes ill for Bank of America’s integration plans.
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Blogger Fred Wilson (oh, OK, he’s a venture capitalist too) has sold his West Village townhouse for $33.15 million, a downtown record. He bought it for $7.35 million in 2000. And the rest of Manhattan’s property market is still booming, … Continue reading →