Fully Deluded: Wall Street Rag



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Exchange Rates: Yen Uber Alles

Amidst all the equity carnage, some neck-snapping stuff going on today in exchange rates. (original story)

Quote du Jour: Sam Glickenhaus

Quote of the day comes from 92-year-old investing legend Seth Glickenhaus: People are frightened and very angry. They feel that everything that has been done is to benefit Wall Street and these preposterous salaries and termination pay packages that leaders of these companies get, irrespective of how good or bad a job they have done. In some cases, they did a more miserable job than you believe. I am not so pessimistic about the future of the stock market. I am more pessimistic about the future of business. More here. (original story)

Scenes from the Wreckage

Some screenshots from the carnage out there today: WSJ NYT NYT  Cramer's sell call (original story)

Dick Fuld TV Today

In about 10 minutes you'll be able to watch Dick Fuld of Lehman at Congressional hearings at this C-Span link. Should be amusing, and possibly market-moving. (original story)

BofA Gives Details on Loan Modification Program

Nice to see that the Feds aren't the only ones bailing people out. Tonight I see a release from BofA wherein it essentially bails itself out itself via a $8.4-billion mortgage modification program for people with home mortgages obtained through its Countrywide subprime subsidiary. Granted, it did this at the urging of various state Attorneys General, but still. The centerpiece of the program is a proactive loan modification process to provide relief to eligible borrowers who are seriously delinquent or are likely to become seriously delinquent as a result of loan features, such as rate res... (original story)

Challenger and the Trouble with Value-At-Risk

Lots of people are newly smart and chattering away about the essential stupidity of value-at-risk modeling. Oh, those dumb financial engineers, they keep saying, How stupid do you have to be to imagine that the real world would conform to a mere formula? Ho-ho. The trouble is, value-at-risk -- a statistical measure of financial losses your portfolio faces given various holdings and market conditions -- actually worked well for some time. It isn't that it was dopey and didn't work; it's that it made some logical and theoretical sense and approximated the real world fairly well -- right up unt... (original story)

Intelligent Life At NBC! SNL Clips On YouTube And Not Shafting Hulu

We were looking for that SNL "CSPAN" clip in which the billionaire husband and wife who sold Wachovia the "pick-a-pay" mortgage lending disaster Golden West were described as "people who should be shot." (below) So, naturally, we started at YouTube. And of course we found the clip immediately. And, lo and behold, we also found that it had been uploaded by NBC (we assume) and was really just a clever ad for the NBC.com site where the video was available in a larger format in HD (see graphic below). So we quickly tipped our hat to the new signs of intelligent life at NBC. And then it got even ... (original story)

No Credit Crisis, Thanks. We're Australian.

There is a true keeper of a gloating column in Monday's Wall Street Journal from an Australian journalist explaining how wonderful, sound, and profitable her country's banks are, and how Australians long ago figured out that not everyone needs a home, etc. etc. Really. That's fascinating. She should, me-thinks, pay a little more attention to the capital structure of her own banks. Sure, they carry AA ratings, which is nice, but ratings are made to be broken. Specifically, there are two risks in Australian banks. First, they depend far too much on wholesale funding. Something like 60 percent ... (original story)

The Promise and Peril of Comprehensive Deposit Insurance

With Germany and Ireland now having more or less made explicit 100% guarantees for all deposits, many people are wondering who's next in the face of the current credit crisis. Will it be the U.S., which only has about 64% of deposits insured, even at the new $250,000 limits? (Note that some of this is high net-worth sorts, but much of it is interbank lines between foreign institutions and U.S. banks. In other words, if it decided to move, much of it could move in a hurry, neatly making the U.S. banks insolvent.) My friend Nouriel Roubini argues that the U.S. needs to temporarily extend deposi... (original story)

Time: Niall Ferguson on the Path Forward

While Time magazine has a somewhat over-the-top cover on the current issue, the underlying article by economist Niall Ferguson is worth reading, even if a little heavy on history and light on prescriptions. What's more, this is no longer an exclusively American crisis. European banks are going under as well. Growth rates in the euro zone and Japan have fallen further than in the U.S. Emerging markets too are suffering. With the exception of Brazil, stock markets in the BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are now down about 40% or more on the year. The notion that Asia has... (original story)

Economist: World on the Edge

The Economist magazine has the cover of the week on the credit crisis: (original story)

Will The iPhone Kill Amazon's Kindle? No. (AMZN, AAPL)

We know Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle faces competition from the likes of Sony (SNE) in the nascent digital reader market, but is Apple's (AAPL) iPhone the bigger threat? Forbes thinks so, noting that free iPhone e-reader Stanza has already been downloaded over 395,000 times. This compares to the 378,000 Kindles that Citi estimates Amazon will be able to sell this year. But this is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Here's why: The iPhone's tiny screen is magnificent for checking your whereabouts on Google Maps or looking up trivia on IMDB, but for long-form text like a novel just thinking about it m... (original story)

Kleiner Perkins' Secret Plan To Make Billions Saving World

A massive article in the NYT by Jon Gertner details Kleiner's greentech strategy. Electric cars, thin-film solar panels, jet-turbine windmills, and KP profits of $1 billion a year. Alas, most of the stuff is so cool, they can't tell you about it. [M]ost of the Kleiner's green-tech investments are not publicly discussed. By my count, the firm has acknowledged 15 of its 40 investments. The rest are in what V.C.'s call 'stealth' mode, hidden from the press (and copycat V.C.'s) until they are on sounder footing. Last summer, the growing number of stealth companies involved with clean energy formed... (original story)

Wall Street Starts Cutting Google Estimates

As we said last week, one of the near-term headwinds for Google's stock is the likelihood that Wall Street will be cutting estimates for the company for a while. We have heard that Google's internal revenue-growth target for 2009 is about 15%, and the Street is still expecting 20%. Also, the global economy is deteriorating rapidly. The vast majority of Google's growth is coming from international markets, and we find it almost inconceivable that Google will power through this unscathed. AmTech's Rob Sanderson cut his Google estimates on Friday. His logic was 1) the rally of the dollar (FOREX h... (original story)

Economist On The Crisis

From Clusterstock: . (original story)




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