Archive for November, 2007
Friday, November 30th, 2007
About a month ago, I wrote a piece for this blog titled: “Why Would Anyone Outside Abu Dhabi Worry about Sovereign Funds?” In that piece I indicated that in a market full of unbelievably clever investors, Sheiks from Abu Dhabi should be welcomed. I suggested that while they might ...
Posted in Sovereign Funds, The Banking Crisis | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007
A “reconsideration event” is when an accounting entity, for example Citigroup, does something for a separate entity, for example a Citigroup “sponsored” Mortgage Conduit, that suggests that all the apparent protections Citigroup’s stockholders seemed to have from the risks posed by the subprime mortgages in the conduit didn’t amount to ...
Posted in Creative Accounting, The Banking Crisis | No Comments »
Saturday, November 24th, 2007
The great irony of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis is that financial risk-takers, as the stock market perceived the risks, weren’t the institutions that lost the big money during the crisis. The big losers were the financial institutions that play by the distorted rules of global bank regulation. Equally surprising ...
Posted in Creative Accounting, The Banking Crisis, When Regulation Goes Wrong | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007
If Milton Friedman were still with us, he would be wearing that shit-eating grin of his. He always maintained that the housing agencies such a Freddie Mac only clothe themselves in a sheepskin of corporate privacy. Congress used the Agencies, he believed, to mislead the public about the true size ...
Posted in Federal Housing Agencies | No Comments »