Ok. So here’s what we do know. It is very unlikely that a “fat finger”–Wall Street lingo for a trader keying in the wrong trade, say selling billions of shares instead of millions–caused the market crash. But what did? Mary Shapiro, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, told a Congressional panel today that the SEC still …
—WSJ has perhaps the definitive story on what caused the market crash last Thursday. So who is to blame? Nassim Taleb, Mr. Black Swan himself. Felix Salmon, Reuters’ uber blogger, thinks pinning the drop on Taleb is poppycock. It’s a disturbing revelation and more than anything else reason why we need new rules to stop this from …
—Is this the number we have been waiting for? The economy added 290,000 jobs in April. That was better than expected. Yes, the unemployment number went up. But that is to be expected as well. As more employers hire, more people come back into the workforce. Still at 9.9% jobless, we have a long way to go. And CNNMoney reports it …
You probably know the bad news already. Stocks on Thursday dropped 600 points in 15 minutes in mid-afternoon. The market went down nearly 1000 points before rebounding. That’s the worst mid-day drop in the Dow Jones industrial average EVER. So really bad stuff. But here’s the good news: Bond prices were up. During the hysteria, the …
—The Senate moved closer to passing a financial reform bill. Dodd is playing down the fact that regulators will lose the ability to create a $50 billion fund to pay for future bailouts. But to me that seems like a big deal. Yes, the government still has the ability to make banks pay for the bailouts after the fact, but without a fund …
There are a lot of reasons to like the idea of a consumer financial protection agency. My colleagues Barbara Kiviat and Michael Grunwald have named the more substantive ones here, here and here. But I think I have stumbled across possibly the most telling data point yet on why the CFPA is a good idea: Jamie Dimon is scared of debating …
–When will the market’s moussaka indigestion end? Not today. The Dow is down nearly 250 points on worries that the European bailout for Greece won’t be big enough.
–Finally, some good news on the housing front. Pending home sales hit a 5-month high in March. For a while it looked like the latest extension to the home buyer tax …
Over the weekend, a Senate Committee headed by Carl Levin released dozens of 4 private Goldman Sachs e-mails. (UPDATE: Dozens more were voluntarily released by Goldman.) They show the computer chatter among Goldman’s top brass, and top mortgage market players during mid-2007, which is the time the housing market was going from …
—Another day, another Goldman scandal. To me, this one is not that damning, at least not to Goldman. To Raj Gupta, that’s another story. To me it is going to be hard to claim that he didn’t know he was passing along insider information. He certainly shouldn’t have told anyone about board business. But I could see him telling a family …
A growing number of people are chiming in to say that the SEC case against Goldman Sachs is not as strong as it seems. Not sure why they would say that. I have read the SEC complaint a few times and it seems like damaging stuff to me. Even if Goldman didn’t break the disclosure rules that are at the heart of the case against it, the …
–Trading profits continue to surge at the investment banks. Morgan Stanley‘s earnings more than doubled expectations as revenue from its currency and trading opperations more than doubled from a year ago. The question is how much of that was from better marks. The company’s value at risk was down from the 4Q, so the good new was the …
–Could Citigroup really be on the mend? After years of disappointing results, Citigroup looks like it had a genuinly good first three months of this year. Analysts were expecting the bank to basically break even, instead the company earned $4.4 billion. Sure, nearly a billion that came from positive marks, but there’s still plenty of …