Although it hasn’t gotten much attention in the business press yet, the House Financial Services Committee is on the warpath to clean up subprime mortgage lending. Most of their ideas, such as tighter regulation of mortgage brokers, strike observers as reasonable. But one has created a great deal of alarm. The concept is “assignee liability,” […]
Read more...So far, it hasn’t gotten much attention in the mainstream business press, but Bloomberg and the Financial Times are very much on top of the story: the House Financial Services Committee is moving forward with proposals to impose new regulations on subprime lending. And Democrats and Republicans are largely on the same page. There are […]
Read more...When I was in M&A, I boiled down the practice of the business to five rules. I believe they are relevant to many other commercial enterprises: 1. Control your client 2. Get the buyer’s price expectations up 3. Spend your time on deals that are likely to happen 4. Everything can be solved by price […]
Read more...There are two reasons this item, picked up in Felix Salmon’s blog, is noteworthy. The first is that investment banks happily extending their balance sheets to help get M&A transactions done is a classic sign of the end of a cycle. The second is that Salmon, who is vastly more sanguine about the state of […]
Read more...Most sophisticated financial people I know take great comfort from the happy resolution of the LTCM debacle. As you may know, LTCM (Long Term Capital Management) was a hedge fund created by John Meriwether, a star trader from Salomon who headed its highly profitable bond arbitrage group, and included two Nobel prize winners among its […]
Read more...Yesterday, we had a link and some commentary on a front-page New York Times article, “Crisis Looms in Mortgages,” by Gretchen Morgenson. Morgenson likes a take-no-prisoners style of writing, and she tends to be controversial due to her forceful articles about CEO pay. I will confess to having read past it (I am inured to […]
Read more...Gretchen Morgenson, in Sunday’s New York Times, has an excellent front page story, “Crisis Looms in Market for Mortgages.” Her forecast is the worst is yet to come. The story describes how delinquencies in the subprime market, already at 12.6%, are already high (we’ve pointed out before that borrowers are also starting to look shaky […]
Read more...The Financial Times reported today, in a page one story, “Funds take firm grip on US Treasuries,” Big hedge funds have recently grabbed such a large share of trading in US Treasury bonds that their activity is eclipsing many of the investment banks which have traditionally dominated the market. This falls in the category, “I […]
Read more...In a very interesting turn of events, Environmental Defense, the group that negotiated for some environmental concessions to win its support for the leveraged buyout of TXU, the Texas utility, by Texas Pacific Group and KKR, has engaged boutique investment banking firm Perella Weinberg. The New York Times, in the story, “Environmental Group Behind the […]
Read more...Oh, how the mighty are fallen… Some of the biggest securities firms’ own debt instruments are now trading as if they were five grades below their current S&P and Moody’s ratings. It’s pretty common when the credit quality of a company is deteriorating that the markets will mark it down before the rating agencies can […]
Read more...Earlier this month, Blackstone Group acquired Equity Office Properties Trust for $39 billion, the largest leveraged buyout in history. When a guy as smart and as plugged in as Sam Zell decides to cash out of his biggest asset, it’s worth considering that he might know something that the rest of us don’t know. But […]
Read more...As we’ve noted, Wall Street firms have been investing in various means of profiting from likely future regulation of carbon emissions, particularly carbon trading. A study by Dr. Robert Shapiro, undersecretary of Commerce in the Clinton Administration (which we found thanks to Greg Mankiw’s blog), concludes that carbon taxes would be more effective than emissions […]
Read more...Dealbreaker.com has been on top of the latest developments in the Enron case, namely that CEO Jeff Skilling’s sentence may be reduced from 24 years to six months (!) and that the Justice Department has decided not to appeal a Fifth Circuit appeals court decision overturning most of the conviction of Merrill Lynch investment bankers. […]
Read more...The Financial Times reported today on a spike up in the ABX index, a means to buy and sell default insurance on mortgage-backed bonds rated BBB- (the very bottom of investment grade bonds) are now trading at nearly 1000 basis points, up from 650 a week ago, a dramatic increase. The reason? More bad news […]
Read more...Maybe it’s just coincidence, but there seems to be a run of particularly good humorous posts on finance-related matters. This one, “Adjusted GPA on a Pro Forma Basis,” from Long or Short Capital, is on the desirability of students learning to misreport, ummm, manipulate, ummm, position data, via how they present their GPAs on their […]
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