RSS feed Substantial Feed Fluff FeedFrom the CBO’s June update on TARP funds (that’s a .pdf):
The market value of outstanding warrants held by the Treasury is around $6 billion, CBO estimates.14 Of the total, about $1 billion is from warrants issued by the 10 banks that recently repaid their TARP funds. However, those calculations are sensitive to the assumptions used [...]
I love that when Cap & Trade was introduced in the 1990s, Democrats and environmentalists derided it as putting a price on the environment and capitulating to business. Republicans pushed it as a market-based solution to a social problem.
Now, Democrats and environmentalists embrace C&T as the greenest thing around (well, other than structurally-similar [...]
This week, we find out that 10 banks are returning TARP money. Or more specifically, 10 banks are repaying $68.3 billion in federal bailout money. This does not mean that these banks are freeing themselves from the yoke of government (only, says the snark in me, it allows them to pay themselves obscene amounts of [...]
The financial crisis has made it appear as though futures markets have been humming along famously and unproblematically until the past few years, when credit default swaps and esoteric derivatives made the otherwise functional system toxic. And this may be. But let’s not pretend that futures markets were always just hedging mechanisms with an added [...]
Cedric Cowing, in his wonder book Populists, Plungers, and Progressives, writes about the distinctions between futures and options in the 19th century and the tenuous myth of deliverability:
Probably the greatest difficulty the exchange forces faced was the task of differentiating between a simple option and a futures contract. Options permitting fulfillment by settlement of differences [...]
from their website: AMERICAN EXPRESS ANNOUNCES REENGINEERING PLAN TO GENERATE $800 MILLION COST BENEFIT
from the New York Times: American Express to Cut 4,000 Jobs, Saving $175 Million
[this is a comment on
It seems to me that one of the fundamental advances and problems with web 2.0 is that it poses expertise against aggregation. The ‘old’ system (and here I would say that these are overlapping, not coterminous ways of doing things) is one of expert reviews, or critics. You want to know what movie to see, [...]
Rick Santelli, some white dude on TV, made news today by dissing Obama’s mortgage plan. He stood on the floor of the CME Group and said:
Santelli: … And in terms of modification, I’ll tell you what, I have an idea. You know, the new administration’s big on computers and new technology, how about this, President [...]
So here’s my guess as to endgame for the ‘bad bank’ plan:
1. Banks, backed by the federal reserve, will buy some of the crummier so-called toxic assets – CDO’s backed by (worthless) mortgages, (wildly overinflated) lease agreements, (defaulted) credit card debt, and other juicy bits.
2. They’ll pair these assets with something looking a lot [...]
Just a Friday thought: I have a decent (sometimes very thorough, sometimes cursory, sometimes not at all) understanding of the financial world, both current crisis, its causes, and some of the technical stuff of contemporary money matters.
If there is something that you want to know, and would like me to take a shot at [...]
There is a wonderful discussion of the subtle differences between modern/contemporary figurative artists over at Illustration Art. Figurative art in this case being nudes (so if you are offended by high art nudes, move on).
The crux of the issue is the difference between Adrian Gottlieb and Job Currin. The former artist is, arguably, technically [...]
I had a couple of interesting discussions with hedge fun friends this past weekend, who are fairly concerned with the latest bit of bad news (incidentally, one noted that people who invest in funds that invest in funds are, in fancy financial terms, ‘morons’).
More interesting was a bit of thought on how much risk [...]
I want to argue in a longer post that the financial crisis should not be thought of a problem with subprime loans, nor a problem of leverage (so consider this a teaser/placeholder). Instead, I think the culprit is the securitization of risk and structured finance. Something down the line would have broke, if it wasn’t [...]
One of the truly underappreciated effects of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is that it created a “whole market” baseline against which really large numbers of people began benchmarking returns.
And the historical returns of the US stock market has been around 10% since 1929.
So there is a massive amount of expectations-generation around [...]
Say what you will about Nassim Nicholas Taleb, he has little patience for economists.
I like how the interviewer keeps trying to be evenhanded, even as he kind of hijacks the interview. He has a personality about which it is hard to be indifferent. My uncle told me that while reading his book (The Black [...]
(As an aside to this post, I’m more than a little annoyed that not one dollar has been donated to donorschoose.org on my behalf, which I wrote about here. And this is likely the last post until something happens on that front, which may mean that I’m done blogging altogether.)
I was too young in 1987 [...]
There was a time when capital, financial, housing markets were distinct-but-related. Housing prices changed with changes in interest rates; the dot-com boom and bust created and lost jobs; the stock and bond markets moved in conjunction with these changes. But while related, they were pretty much distinct kinds of markets. This was true for a [...]
I made a few claims, it’s fair to see how I’m doing:
1)
- This is not a market collapse, in the sense of a price drop in the stock market. It is an institutional collapse because of a price drop. In other words, as long as housing prices, avarice, and economic growth propped up the more [...]
That’s about it. It’s never going make justice and equality, nor will it necessarily avert financial melt-down. But without it, there’s a real chance that there will be spill-over to the real economy. In April, I wrote about a system collapse, and while I still don’t think it would be Armageddon, I do think that [...]