October 14, 2008
I know Nassim Taleb brings out strong feelings in people, but you have to admit the following quote from my friend Nassim is good: We refused to touch credit default swaps. It would be like buying insurance on the Titanic...
The current issue of Foreign Policy has a Luigi Zingales proposal for extending the current bailout to mortgage holders. The argument, of course, is that further waves of defaults just keep us standing still. The contrary argument is that no-one...
I like to approach the financial world with a thesis, an idea, at least in broad terms, about how things will play out, now and in the longer terms. I've tried to be clear about that in posts here, as...
Today's L.A. Times has possibly the most awesome accidental (I think) juxtaposition of a newspaper front page headline and cover picture in recent memory. Click on it for a larger version. Up in smoke, as it were?...
(This is completely random, so feel free to move on.) It has largely gone unremarked, but single-letter tickers have really gone out of vogue at the NYSE. While such tickers used to be the ultimate status symbol for upwardly-mobile blue-chip...
Tonight Jon Stewart noticed the recent first appearance ever on CNBC of the decabox -- ten talking heads in teensy on-screen boxes. That is, of course, up from the widely-noted octabox of a few weeks back. The entire episode of...
The heads of the nine big banks in the U.S. got briefed yesterday on Henry Paulson's equity injection plan -- they will all get new capital and we taxpayers as shareholders -- and then they ran for their limos, much...
Some interesting comments last Friday on Charlie Rose from investor Peter Thiel and Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post. Granted, some of it was a little instantly dated, so be sure to get past the initial chatter about what the...
Expecting that we would have a market bounce Monday -- albeit nothing like the ultra-super-pogo-sproing thing that we did -- I launched a contest this past Sunday night. The idea: People had to predict how many times on Monday between...
Exxon Mobil was up a little more than 17% today. That works out to a gain of roughly $50-billion in market capitalization, or about the GDP of Luxembourg -- or six pre-Monday Morgan Stanleys....
