« Previous  |  Next »

Can Options Spikes Be a Coincidence?

Whenever there’s a surprise takeover bid at a significant premium to the (formerly) prevailing stock-market price, dozens of journalists and bloggers immediately pull up options-volume data. Much of the time, they discover a suspicious spike in options ...

From FELIX SALMON, Seeking Alpha,  17 Nov 2009

What Are the Arguments for Privileging Debt?

Three cheers to Jim Surowiecki for unambiguously adding his voice to those who would abolish the tax-deductibility of interest payments: Debt didn’t get dangerously out of scale because the system was broken. It got out of scale, in part, because the ...

From FELIX SALMON, Seeking Alpha,  16 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Paul Volcker

Goldman Sachs' Not-Very-Charitable Foundation

Geraldine Fabrikant gets her hands on the 2008 tax filing for the Goldman Sachs Foundation today, and it’s pretty astonishing stuff: The latest tax filing for Goldman Sachs’s foundation is as thick as a phone book. The list of trades is more than 200 ...

From FELIX SALMON, Seeking Alpha,  12 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Goldman Sachs Foundation,  Asia Society,  Johns Hopkins

The Decline of Credit Cards

Ezra Klein, on what he considers a vicious cycle in credit cards: The problem is that the people who migrate toward debit cards are the people who have enough money not to need much credit and are responsible enough to not want it. The good risks, in ...

From FELIX SALMON, Seeking Alpha,  11 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Bank of America

Putting Source Documents Online

Gabriel Sherman has a long profile of Andrew Ross Sorkin, which spends a lot of time talking about Sorkin’s problematic status within the NYT in general and the Sunday Business section in particular. But all big companies have internal politics. What’s ...

From FELIX SALMON, Seeking Alpha,  9 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Andrew Ross Sorkin,  John Cook

Ken Lewis and the Regulators

If there was a bank executive who seemed to have the mettle to withstand today’s regulatory and market pressures, it was Ken Lewis. The Mississippi native clawed to the top of Bank of America. After succeeding his mentor, Hugh McColl Jr., as chairman ...

From FELIX SALMON, ETF Investor,  9 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Kenneth D Lewis,  Bank of America,  Hugh McColl,  John Mack,  Timothy F. Geithner

Doing Due Diligence on Galleon

I’m late to Sam Jones’s article about investors who did due diligence on Galleon and decided to stay away, but I think it raises a number of silly ideas which ought to be put to rest. First, it’s worth noting that, ex post, this kind of exercise can be ...

From FELIX SALMON, Seeking Alpha,  8 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Raj Rajaratnam

Mutual Fund Fee Datapoint of the Day

What happened to mutual-fund fees and expenses in the wake of the financial crisis? Lipper has crunched the numbers, and it seems that the tumble in the stock market didn’t have much effect on expenses: Surprisingly, the median management expense for ...

From FELIX SALMON, Seeking Alpha,  6 Nov 2009

10.2%

In October, the number of unemployed persons increased by 558,000 to 15.7 million. The unemployment rate rose by 0.4 percentage point to 10.2 percent, the highest rate since April 1983. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of ...

From FELIX SALMON, ETF Investor,  6 Nov 2009

Those Lucrative Interest-Rate Hedges

The interest rate on [Goldman's] long-term borrowings was a minuscule 0.92% in the third quarter, down from 3.53% in the third quarter of 2008. This $203 billion of debt is Goldman’s largest single funding source, so as its cost plunges, its bottom ...

From FELIX SALMON, Seeking Alpha,  5 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Wells Fargo,  Goldman Sachs

« Previous  |  Next »

Who is This?

Help us add to our database, by linking this writer their entry in Wikipedia or Source Watch, or by suggesting that we remove it from our index.

Suggest an Entry