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Grasping Reality with Both Hands (Free subscription) | yesterday
He writes: >Felix Salmon: Sky News is using YouTube to host their entire “News Corp will block Google” interview with Murdoch... I keep on thinking that there is something powerful and important to be written about Google's success and the elective affinity between non-rival commodities and advertising. In order to charge people who buy things money, you have to make the commodity excludable....
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Craig Financial blog (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
Felix Salmon » Blog Archive » Mutual fund fee datapoint of the day Blogs
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SeekingAlpha Media Stocks (Free subscription) | yesterday
Felix Salmon submits: 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 interesting is what the story says about the NYT’s devotion, or otherwise, to serving its readers by giving...
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SeekingAlpha.com (Free subscription) | yesterday
Felix Salmon submits: The WSJ has an interesting Ken Lewis profile today: 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 and CEO in 2001, Mr. Lewis kept up a blistering pace of acquisitions...
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The Economist (Free subscription) | yesterday
Forget whether it works, how much does it cost? VIA Felix Salmon, here's an interesting look at the TSA (the folks who make you take your shoes off at airports) from the Government Accountability Office:TSA lacks assurance that its investments in screening technologies address the highest priority security needs at airport passenger checkpoints. Since TSA’s creation, 10 passenger screening technologies...
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Abnormal Returns (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
Jim Chanos hates muni bonds. (Barron’s also A Dash of Insight) The global gold rush is on. (Green Sheet, The Reformed Broker) Are ETFs causing a bubble in emerging markets? (WSJ) Felix Salmon, “Mutual funds are moving away from being a mass-market product, and becoming more of a niche product aimed at elderly investors who don’t know any [...]
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SeekingAlpha.com (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
Felix Salmon submits: 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 done on any hedge fund. The vast majority of hedge-fund investors, and all big ones, do some kind of due diligence...
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The Big Picture (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
I had lunch last week with Rolfe Winkler, who is an up and comer in the blog world, a thinking man’s Felix Salmon. He is similarly annoyed with St. Warren — but rather than engage in my sophmoric venom spew, he went to the spreadsheet to discover that Buffet owns major stakes in 8 companies that [...]
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SeekingAlpha ETFs (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
Felix Salmon submits: 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 most asset classes was largely unchanged from 2008 levels; most exhibited changes of +/- a few tenths of a basis point....
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SeekingAlpha.com (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Felix Salmon submits: I don’t understand much of the mathematics in Nassim Taleb’s new paper , co-written with Charles Tapiero. But still I fear that the paper’s main point is hidden in a blizzard of equations: Complete Story »
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The Economist (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
But is that the real threat? FELIX SALMON, back from a long blog vacation, is keeping his eyes open for the next big crash, and he thinks his old boss Nouriel Roubini has spotted a good candidate:Nouriel’s analysis is quite compelling, given the way the carry trade works. In its most harmless form, people borrow at low rates in a funding currency and then invest the proceeds in a higher-yielding...
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The Business Insider (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
This week, McClatchy reporter Greg Gordon produced what, at first blush, looked like a major Goldman Sachs (GS) expose. The central claim was that Goldman knew that toxic assets were in fact toxic long before the rest of the market, but that they continued packaging them and selling them to customers. The story actually had some great reporting -- really getting some good details about when Goldman...
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Kevin Drum - Mother Jones (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Felix Salmon is back from vacation and he's tanned, rested, and ready. Today he notes that Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo made big money on interest rate swaps last quarter and asks: And there’s another question, too: if the likes of Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs are making billions on these swaps, who’s on the other side of the trade? Who lost billions of dollars by swapping floating into...
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Abnormal Returns (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Felix Salmon, “..every move upwards in US stocks or gold or the Aussie dollar or junk-bond indices is another step in exactly the wrong direction: it’s a step towards yet another massive crash. And it’s all being turbo-charged by Fed policy.” (Felix Salmon) Hedge funds have been prime beneficiaries of this ‘carry trade’ as their returns [...]
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SeekingAlpha.com (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Felix Salmon submits: Peter Eavis notes something quite astonishing today: 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 line benefits… Complete Story »
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