Life is hard to believe sometimes. The largest (series of) fraudulent act(s by a single individual) in history. And his name tells it all: he made off with the boodle.
I imagine it will be some considerable time before things become at all clear. A former lifeguard, now aged 70, he set up on Wall Street […]
The latest US T-bill auction apparently went briefly negative. In other words, bidders paid to be sure of getting their money back in 3 months time.
The same thing happened in the secondary market soon after the Lehman collapse.
One should not read too much into it, there were all kinds of special factors and […]
The graph shows the FTSE100 for the last three months (courtesy of finance.google.co.uk). Lehman’s was allowed to collapse at the peak just before the H (weekend 12/15 September). So it is now fairly clear what has happened. The market fell about 1300 from around 5500 to 4200, a drop of nearly a quarter, in […]
Few people seem able to maintain a grasp of the detail and a clear view of the whole.
I was reflecting on this whilst looking at some recent material on mortgage backed securities (MBS). The sublime was Michael Lewis - author of one of my all-time favourite business books, Liar’s Poker. He has recently been […]
People often get irritated with me because I am pedantic about puns and other word-plays. Take “I.O.U.S.A.”. It seems to be a neat combination of “IOU” (the traditional shorthand for ‘I owe you’) and USA. To make it slicker, the second U is deleted. But that means it translates as “I owe [the] USA”, […]