Bailout

The triumph of Davos

Posted on January 30, 2011
Davos, in 2011, was the year when the cynics were finally proven wrong.

Wine list of the day, Davos edition

Posted on January 28, 2011
The prize for most obnoxious party at Davos was won on the first night, with the Davos Tasting put on by the Wine Forum.

Building a regulatory architecture for microfinance

Posted on January 28, 2011
The best panel I went to at Davos this year -- and I got the impression that most of the other people there would say the same thing -- was a lunch session today on going "beyond microfinance" when it comes to providing financial services to the unbanked around the world.

The negative-sum new reality

Posted on January 27, 2011
Remember those off-the record comments by "top executives from Goldman Sachs and Standard Chartered" which indicated that the era of contrition had come to an end? Well, they're on the record now, splashed all over the front page of this morning's FT.

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Nick Clegg’s inaccessible press event

Posted on January 27, 2011
One of the big changes to the ecology of the Davos conference center this year, after its $37 million revamp, is that there's now a whole level at the top which is off-limits to the working press and accessible only to fully-fledged delegates with coveted white cards.

The WSJ joins forces with short-seller demonizers

Posted on January 26, 2011
Mike Elk dug into the weird way in which various well-regarded liberal activists were suddenly campaigning aggressively alongside the for-profit education industry.

Obama’s fiscal weak tea

Posted on January 26, 2011
The good news about the State of the Union Address is the same as the bad news: there was really nothing substantive there when it comes to fiscal policy.

Charts of the day, US listings edition

Posted on January 25, 2011
My cunning plan to get my readers to do all the work for me in terms of finding graphs of the number of stocks listed on the NYSE and Nasdaq worked like magic! Here from Second Market, is the chart for the NYSE:

Is the era of the public company coming to an end?

Posted on January 25, 2011
One of the problems with Davos, and with ambitious conferences in general, is that all too often the conversation becomes meaninglessness. So well done to Henry Blodget at the DLD conference in Munich.

The NYT?s bizarre iPad paywall

Posted on January 24, 2011
Russell Adams has some inside dope on the price the NYT is intending to charge with its paywall:

Counterparties

Posted on January 24, 2011
The effect of the NYT front page: Terrified Investors Sold Out Of Munis At Record Pace Last Week -- TBI

Debt collection math

Posted on January 24, 2011
Mark Gimein has an interesting analysis of the economics of Encore Capital Group, a company which buys up hundreds of thousands of busted credit cards and consumer loans for pennies on the dollar, then pushes them through assembly-line litigation to make a surprisingly small profit.

Counterparties

Posted on January 22, 2011
Why on earth is Immelt the jobs tzar? "GE may be wonderful in many respects, but US job creation isn?t one of them" -- PDB, Nasiripour

Labor vs capital datapoint of the day, NYC taxi edition

Posted on January 22, 2011
New York taxis are a textbook example of gains going to capital rather than to labor.

Counterparties

Posted on January 21, 2011
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on the muni crisis -- CBPP

Treasury?s astonishing statement on US default

Posted on January 21, 2011
Four years ago, I started pushing back against the idea that whenever the government fails to make good on some obligation or other, that's exactly the same thing as a bond default.

Eisenhower charts of the day

Posted on January 21, 2011
My fabulous editor, Jim Ledbetter, had a party a couple of days ago for his new book about Dwight Eisenhower. He asked for the most famous passage from Eisenhower's 1953 "cross of iron" speech to be turned into updated charts, so here you go:

Wall Street analysts deserve a ?sell? rating

Posted on January 21, 2011
Jennifer Saba makes an important point about milquetoast tech analysts today: faced with huge news about shake-ups in the CEO position at both Apple and Google, precisely zero analysts asked any questions on that subject during the companies' earnings calls.

Eric Schmidt?s next act

Posted on January 21, 2011
Ken Auletta, who literally wrote the book when it comes to Google, has a must-read take on what exactly is going on with Eric Schmidt.

The metastasizing state-bankruptcy meme

Posted on January 21, 2011
Talk of introducing legislation allowing states to declare bankruptcy began in earnest in November.

Counterparties

Posted on January 20, 2011
Why Obama has to nominate a CFPB director by July -- HuffPo

Eric Schmidt and the job of non-CEO executive chairman

Posted on January 20, 2011
Ten years is a long time to be one of the most visible CEOs in the world, especially when the buck doesn't really stop with you but rather with a triumvirate where you're clearly the third wheel.

Desnobbing wine

Posted on January 20, 2011
David Kesmodel reports that US consumers finally seem to be waking up to the fact that there's no correlation between price and quality when it comes to wine:

Dodd-Frank vs Basel III

Posted on January 20, 2011
When the big financial-overhaul bill was working its way through Congress, Treasury persuaded legislators to avoid passing rules on bank capital or liquidity. Leave all that to Basel, they said, so that there could be a global, unified system.

Norway, entrepreneurial paradise

Posted on January 20, 2011
Max Chafkin has a fantastic story in Inc magazine about how to structure an economy so as to encourage entrepreneurship, full employment, and general happiness and contentment, all while drastically reducing inequality. It's easy, in fact: all you need to do is become Norway.

Counterparties

Posted on January 19, 2011
JPM admits it overcharged thousands of military families for their mortgages, and improperly foreclosed on 14 -- MSNBC

How Larry Summers hobbled Obama?s economic policy

Posted on January 19, 2011
I love myself a brutal takedown, and Jason Linkins's evisceration of Peter Baker's big NYT Magazine story on Obama's economic policy is a classic of the genre.

Top tips from Davos spouses

Posted on January 19, 2011
Just as the most interesting sessions at Davos are the ones you know the least about, the most interesting people tend to turn out to be the ones you've never heard of.

Goldman?s monster financial-crisis pay award

Posted on January 19, 2011
Dealbook and Footnoted -- the very epitome of professional financial blogs -- have collaborated in a big investigation of Goldman Sachs's regulatory filings and partnership documents. The investigation seems to have turned up some pretty juicy stuff, but I'm not a fan of how the results were presented.

Unemployment datapoints of the day

Posted on January 19, 2011
The Gallup global employment data are out, and there's a huge amount of meat here, including this unemployment map:

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