The indispensable Epicurean Dealmaker—whom I would surely hire if (a) I were in need of an investment banker and (2) I could figure out who he is—makes a rare defense of his kind:
I stick by my assertion that we did not create the huge global demand for riskless returns that is at the root of our current predicament. Investment
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Watching Congressional hearings on important topics always seems beforehand like it’s going to be a good idea. You know: Our elected representatives, asking the experts (or the culprits) the questions that need to be asked. Every once in a while it does work out this way: I thought the Senate Banking Committee’s hearings on the banking …
So this ad for the Palm Pre comes on TV, and a strangely familiar tune comes on in the background. I think about it for a few minutes, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, it comes to me: Doot Doot.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opaeNiiizxo]
The news yesterday that John Meriwether had shut down his latest hedge fund, JWM Partners, wasn’t exactly news. Word got out back in February that the man behind legendary blowup Long-Term Capital Management was again in trouble, albeit of a less spectacular sort than 11 years ago (JWM’s main fund was down 44% from September 2007 through …
A TARP chronology:
Sept. 17, 2008: Lehman Brothers has just gone under, the financial world seems to be collapsing under our ears, and Nick Brady, Gene Ludwig and Paul Volcker propose in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the only thing that can save us is a “mechanism in place to remove” toxic real estate assets from the financial …
This is of a piece with Barbara’s annoyed Monday post about Dan Ariely and Hershey’s kisses. Stephen Laniel, whose entertaining and educational blog I came across because I keep track of online mentions of my book and it’s currently on his reading list (see, narcissism has its uses!) muses about what kind of niche he could fill as an …
Writes Tom Lauricella in a fascinating article in today’s WSJ:
Asset allocation, a bedrock of investing for decades, appeared to fail miserably in 2008. The conviction shared by most investors — that they should spread their money across myriad asset classes to minimize losses — was shaken as nearly all markets tumbled in unison.
The …
There have been two main theories of why things went so wrong at General Motors. One is that the company is run by a bunch of ingrown retreads with no sense of where the automotive business was headed. The other is that the company’s management has been so burdened by commitments (to pensions, to retiree health care, to union work rules) …
I read most of The Hobbit last night. I’d been reading it in very small chunks to Curious Capitalist Jr. over the past few months. He’s perfectly capable of reading it himself, but didn’t seem to want to, so I started reading it to him. Yesterday we dropped CC Jr. off at summer camp, so I figured I’d read ahead in the book—which I read …
Stan Collender writes a rousing defense of the Washington Post plan—since abandoned in the face of criticism/controversy—to charge for access to “intimate dinners” at publisher Katharine Weymouth’s house:
The only thing the Washington Post really did that was wrong is that it apologized.
Other news outlets have been doing things
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Goldman Sachs reported earnings this morning, and it reported lots of them—$3.44 billion in the quarter ending June 26. That’s well more than the $2.33 billion Goldman’s made in the comparable quarter in 2007, back before the world started falling apart. In other words, Goldman may be emerging from this crisis in a better position than …
Ezra Klein writes, regarding Sarah Palin’s cap-and-trade op-ed in today’s Washington Post, that its failure to mention “global warming” or “climate change” makes it “a bit like an op-ed that attacks firefighters for pointing pressurized water cannon(s) at everything but never mentions fires.” I’m not absolutely sure the analogy is fair, …
