It’s revealing that Robert Kuttner’s hard hitting, cogent testimony before the House Committee on Financial Services (hat tip Culture of Life News) has gotten very little attention in the media and the blogsphere. Perhaps it’s because Kuttner, an economist and former investigator for the Senate Banking Committee, argues persuasively that the strong ideological bias against […]
Read more...Paul Kedrosky (of Infectious Greed fame) points to a a terrific paper by Amir E. Khandaniy and Andrew W. Lo of MIT, “What Happened to the Quants in August 2007?”. I’ll confess that I have only skimmed it, but it looks thoughtful, has all the right caveats (the researchers admit they may not have and […]
Read more...A few days ago, we said we were willing to eat a bit of crow. Even though we had acknowledged some time ago that Bear might not survive the subprime mess as an independent firm, we also thought that no one with any sense would take a strategic position (taking a speculative bet is an […]
Read more...Investment banks are learning about reputation risk the hard way. First we had Bear Stearns winding down two troubled hedge funds it would have rather cut loose and let sink on their own. Then Lehman was pilloried in the Wall Street Journal, in “How Wall Street Stoked the Mortgage Meltdown, for its particularly close relationship […]
Read more...Goldman, on the back foot about the truly abysmal performance of its Global Alpha fund, is trying to shore up investor confidence, or more accurately, forestall a revolt. However, a Wall Street Journal article reports that they aren’t taking the sort of measures they did in August with the troubled Global Equity Opportunities Fund, when […]
Read more...In an amazing instance of collateral damage, the new bankruptcy law that took effect in October 2005, designed to enable banks to wrestle more money from overextending credit card users, hascaught hedge funds in its net. The old law exempted many types of bank securities lending, such as repo agreements, to be included in a […]
Read more...Bloomberg reports that Goldman’s big hedge fund, Global Alpha, which took a beating along with other quantitatively oriented traders, was down 22.5% in August. Even among quant funds, this was lackluster performance. James Simons’ Renaissance Technologies recouped the 8.7% loss it suffered at the beginning of the month. But here comes the juicy bit: of […]
Read more...I’m late to this item, and I probably should let it go, but it is so disingenuous (I’m tempted to say intellectually dishonest) that I can’t let it go by. On Sunday, the New York Times ran an “Economics View” article, “It’s Monetary Policy, Not a Morality Play,” by Tyler Cowen, well known libertarian and […]
Read more...MarketWatch reports that the Paulson Credit Opportunities fund, which focuses on distress in the mortgage markets, earned 26.7% in August, which brings its returns year to date to 410%. A sister fund pursuing broadly the same strategy but started a bit later, Paulson Credit Opportunities II, was up 32% in August and 230% for the […]
Read more...Readers have probably figured out that I think the reporting in the Wall Street Journal is overrated. We have a prime example on page one today, “How Market Turmoil Waylaid the ‘Quants’.” My understanding is that newspapers are in the business of providing news. The story that the quants are in trouble is a month […]
Read more...As concern about tightening conditions in the credit markets and the continued erosion of the US supbrime and broader housing market has grown, so too have calls for Extreme Measures to combat these snowballing problems. The first was from Bill Gross at Pimco, who suggested that the US government “rescue” the 2 millionish homeowners who […]
Read more...The UK’s Times Online, citing Hedge Fund Research (HFR), reports that hedge fund strategies of all sorts took a beating in August: Of the 20 daily hedge fund indices tracked by HFR, only one managed a positive result in August with the other 19 showing a negative performance. One fund index – the Macro index […]
Read more...John Dizard, in today’s Financial Times, tells us why, despite the fact that a lot of fixed income paper is on offer at very cheap prices, no one seems to be stepping to the plate. And his explanation bodes ill for things turning around very soon. The simple story is that even though the buys […]
Read more...Hedge funds, which even at their peak of popularity, were regarded with considerable suspicion, have taken a shellacking in the last few months as subprime tainted funds have folded or reported poor results, and “quant” strategies have failed spectacularly, due to extraordinary, allegedly unprecedented market turmoil. Of course, the problem with that defense is that […]
Read more...Today, in a comment at the Financial Times, “This is where Freddie and Fannie step in” (subscription required), Harvard’s Larry Summers argued that the subprime crisis highlights three questions. Most commentators focused on the one question he not only posed but answered, namely, what role government should play in aiding the flow of credit to […]
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