Well, that’s not exactly how he put it. But at discussion this morning at the Milken Institute Global Conference, hedge fund titan Griffin did say this:
Gains were shared by millions of Americans through home equity extraction and sale of homes. … It dwarfed the gains reaped by Wall Street. …
We have allowed what was a society-wide
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I’m sitting in a gigantic ballroom at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, waiting for a Milken Institute Global Conference panel on when the financial recovery is coming. But I’ve already breezed through Jo Becker and Gretchen Morgenson’s epic examination of Tim Geithner’s lunch dates while he was president of the New York Fed.
In …
The Federal Reserve today released the details of how the stress tests that regulators conducted at the country’s 19 biggest banking companies were put together. The first big revelation: They’re not called stress tests. They’re called the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program, or SCAP.
Regulators were also out and about today telling …
I’ve been meaning to welcome Ryan Avent to his new gig at Portfolio.com (where he has replaced Felix Salmon). His musings over the past couple of days about why the Obama Administration is handling the banking crisis in such a tentative, unimpressive way provide a good opportunity. Here’s one:
There is a popular idea that if only a
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In the comments here and in his own blog, Sean DeCoursey has been pushing what he calls “distillation” as the solution to the near-total freeze-up of securitized lending:
Distillation is the opposite of securitization. All the various components of the securitized debt are pieced back together into one single coherent original whole.
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The attorney general of Michigan thinks that if GM or Chrysler file for bankruptcy protection, they should do so in the state of Michigan. Seems he sent a letter (PDF) to the two companies about that. This is my favorite part:
I am gravely concerned about the impact of any bankruptcy filing in a jurisdiction outside Michigan. Since
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After Citigroup and Bank of America both reported profits that were boosted perversely and dramatically (in Citi’s case there would have been no profit without it) by declines in the value of their debt and debt-related derivatives, now we get the opposite situation in Morgan Stanley’s quarterly earnings report:
these results were
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My book just got its first media coverage. And it’s on a Dutch financial Website. How cool is that?
(The writer, Katrijn de Ronde, happened to be in New York a couple of weeks ago working on another article. She had gotten all interested in financial market theory after reading Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed, and came across my …
Gabriel Sherman’s New York magazine article about Wall Streeters and their pay is full of gems. But, partly because I’ve got efficient markets on the brain as I prepare to flog my anti-efficient-markets book, this passage interested me most:
A few weeks ago, I had drinks with a friend who used to work at Lehman Brothers. She had come to
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Standard & Poor’s released its latest Indices Versus Active Funds Scorecard today, and the headline result is the same one delivered by almost every study of mutual fund performance since the 1960s: Most actively managed mutual funds underperform the market. To be precise, 66.21% of actively managed domestic stock funds underperformed …
On Friday I noted that Citigroup wouldn’t have reported a profit if it hadn’t been for a $2.5 billion derivatives valuation adjustment “mainly due to the widening of Citi’s CDS spreads.” Citi’s CDS spreads widen when traders think Citi is more likely to default. So basically, Citi was able to report a profit because fears grew that it …
I spent a couple hours this morning listening to yesterday’s JP Morgan Chase earnings call and this morning’s Citigroup call. And I wrote this about it.
