Barry Ritholtz reprints a scary e-mail from a friend in the collaterized debt obligation business (don’t you have a friend in the CDO business?): I was talking to CDO managers in mid-’05 that were saying how rich sub-prime MBS was and how wrong everyone was for buying that stuff at the spreads they were. To [...]
My new column is in the issue of Time with Mother Theresa on the cover and online here. It begins: Much of what Ben Bernanke spends his days doing oscillates between the incomprehensibly arcane and the unspeakably dull. Lately, though, the Federal Reserve chairman has a stark, even exciting task at hand. He’s been imitating [...]
I checked out Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s 2000 book Essays on the Great Depression at the library the other day. It’s not what you’d call a page turner, but it does offer some cool insights into his thinking. It’s a collection of lectures and journal articles, some going as far back as the early 1980s, [...]
The collective wigging out of the quantitative hedge funds earlier this month has been one of the most fascinating stories to come out of the market’s summer troubles. Joe Nocera wrote the best layman’s explanation in his NYT column on Saturday (a column that, I feel obliged to note because it makes me sound important, [...]
In the NYT this morning, David Leonhardt writes that the Federal Reserve should do more to push against inflating investment bubbles: The Fed could have tightened financial rules, like the amount of cash that must be put up for a given investment. It also could have used the bully pulpit. Imagine what might have happened [...]
Businessweek.com has a lovely slide show (link from Harold Maass) of mortgage industry executives who used to be really rich and now aren’t so much. Meanwhile, Bloomberg has an article (via Trader Daily) on how the credit crunch “may cut Wall Street bonuses for the first time in five years.” Hooray for that, I say. [...]
The big news in Holland Tuesday is that a TV report claiming that soccer star Mark van Bommel is planning to become a German citizen was a hoax that Van Bommel helped manufacture. This is very funny stuff in Holland, I think. (You want to become a … German?!? Ha ha ha ha ha.) Anyway, [...]
In an e-mail that came in while I was on vacation, reader Mike Mitchell wrote: Just curious about something I see you and others mention frequently, especially in light of Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal. The phrase typically invoked is “right-wing editorial page”. I read the WSJ every day – read the [...]
Every once in a while (more often than really is appropriate, but not what you could call frequently), I look up from what I’m reading in the subway to discover that I’ve missed my stop. Sometimes I’ve even missed two stops. Anyway, as I rolled into Times Square on the downtown 1 train Monday morning [...]
Warren Buffett is quoted in this morning’s W$J saying that “I can spend money faster than Imelda Marcos when things are right.” The implication of the Heard on the Street column in which he appears is that after several overpriced years, things are getting to be “right,” athough Buffett himself never says this. All in [...]
