Tom Perkins of Kleiner Perkins fame has his mega-super-yacht Maltese Falcon for sale. Launched only in the summer of 2006, and nos being sold for $166m or so, this is not going be a 10x exit for the former venture capitalist.

At an admittedly cursory first read, my initial reaction to the Treasury plan to save us all from financial markets is to short housing and insurance. Those are the two main areas that will a new and heavier regulatory burden.

Housing is proposed to be subject to a new Mortgage Origination Commission. Because markets are so awful, and companies can't decide whether to enter the mortgage business themselves, we now are apparently going to have the MOC deciding whether states are up to snuff with respect to the certifying companies permitted to enter the mortgage origination business. Gagh. Kill me.

And then there's insurance. There Paulson proposes new federal regulation of that stodgy business by creating a new national insurance office within Treasury, one that would oversee any insurance firms so dumb as to choose to have a federal charter.

With the Brazilian real having its first monthly decline against the U.S. dollar since November, and BRIC (Brazil/Russia/India/China) markets all having a bad run -- the Shanghai Composite is off 34% this year -- I thought it timely to take a look at how the BRIC trade has been doing. Assuming you were long an equal-weighted portolio of the BRICs, and short the U.S. markets, here is how the two sides of the trade have done since 1/1/2006.

It is, to use the technical terms, doing horribly. The bottom fell out of the trade in early February, with the spread between the two indices converging, and now the BRIC countries' market performance have passed the U.S. on their way lower. Commodity currency countries are not a fun place to be right now.

The wet weather records set in March of 2008 have me thinking at least as much about global wetting as about global warming:

• Record or near record precipitation occurred in a swath from eastern Texas into the Ohio Valley and Interior Northeast. Record flooding occurred in many locations.
• Dallas had its wettest March since 1977 (8.42 inches) and 2^nd wettest in nearly 50 years.
• St. Louis had its wettest March (6.84 inches) since 1961.
• Cincinnati had its wettest March (9.81 inches) since 1993 and 3rd wettest since 1961.

[via Planalytics]

It's easy to take potshots at the Paulson plan, and I haven't resisted doing that, especially its embrace of new regulations, but is there anything to like about it?

Sure. It's nice to see an attempt to harmonize a system of complex, overlapping regulations that numb the mind, make lawyers rich, and stall innovation and competition. As Paulson concedes, parts of the regulatory superstructure for the U.S. banking system have been around since the 1860s, and modernization is overdue.

Faint praise? Admittedly. But I generally struggle with the justification for most banking regulations. Yes, the taxpayer is on the hook because a) the Fed is the lender of last resort, and b) we have deposit insurance, so we need to have a governmental presence. But that is circular, in that it begs the question of why we have a governmental presence in the first place. What is it that's so darn special about banking that we're willing to bear the price of bank bailouts, regulations, etc., just to make sure we don't have a repeat of bank runs?

It sometimes seems like we regulate banks because this cosseted industry surrounded by governmental safety nets attracts and employs too many nitwits who require us to keep an eye on them.

Here is a poster-child for how hot sectors don't always translate into hot stocks: The GPS business is booming, with such location devices being the hot product this past Christmas, and lots of heat, but sector kingpin Garmin is touching new 52-week lows today.

[Update] My friend Om is, as always, right there on the "death of GPS" story. Good stuff.

Does being in the right social network mean an easier time getting credit? Good question. An interesting new paper looks whether Freemasons favor one another with loans:

Using a unique data set of 410 companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange between 1895 and 1902, I find that Masonic managers were associated with greater access to credit in small and young companies whose securities where traded over the counter. These companies earned higher profits, but the effect is not statistically significant. On the other hand, large publicly quoted corporations that were managed by Freemasons did not obtain greater access to credit; they had lower profits and lower Tobin's Q.

So much for my putative Freemason large-cap factor in models ...

[via SSRN]

As a regular exercise, I like to ask myself to come up with a list of things that I currently believe, but there is a higher than average chance I'm wrong about. It's always a good exercise.

Some examples:

• The subprime reset damage in 2008 will be less than most people think
• The current recession -- yes, we're in a recession -- will end in the second quarter
• We are going to hear chatter about a double-dip recession by the fourth quarter of this year
• Yahoo will get bought by Microsoft
• Barry Ritholz is a perma-bear
• Blogs matter
• Interest rates won't rise in the second half as fast as the Fed might like
• The BRIC trade is over

Etc. etc. Feel free to add in your own.

Interesting to see that activist hedge fund Pardus Capital is being forced to stop redemptions. The firm has positions in the Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and Atos Origin, and on Monday it apparently told investors couldn't (temporarily) have their money back.

Interesting. While there has been much discussion of issues with private equity investors being forced out of deals for which they could no longer find financing, is something similar happening unremarked to activists? Are their target companies' stocks so badly broken that activists are being forced to divest positions and abandon more targets than usual? If so, the rest would be interesting, to say the least, given the huge number of activist hedge fund that have come into the market in recent years.

I know, I know, magazine/newspaper contrarian cover indicators are passe, but still ... this overdone one from The Independent has to be worth something, doesn't it?

[Update] Good, empirically-minded takedown of the article's argument here.