RADAMISTO (Free subscription) | 11/21/2008
(h/t Barry Ritholtz ) Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) almost failed catastrophically in 1998 and had to be bailed out. It's collapse should've IMPRINTED into the minds of the MOTU that it's financial models could be drastically wrong but it didn't. Roger Lowenstein described the fall of LTCM in his book " When Genius Failed " and he summarized the findings in a NYT article and shows...
Artur Adib's Blog (Free subscription) | 11/15/2008
I thought the quote below by Ben Graham would be informative; or at least would make us feel better about not understanding the stock market. It's taken from a superb biography on Warren Buffett by Roger Lowenstein (which I highly recommend, by the way). Warren Buffet himself learned the basics of investing from Ben Graham, then Professor at Columbia and co-author of the classic book...
Option ARMageddon (Free subscription) | 11/18/2008
... ago. But during 2007, shortly after I published my first op-ed about the credit crunch, I read Roger Lowenstein’s book on the LTCM collapse . When I did, the profound instability of our international monetary order struck me like a freight train. Using the LTCM debacle as exhibit A, Lowenstein explains deleveraging, the process by which levered institutions have to sell assets...
Buckeye State Blog - Comments (Free subscription) | 11/12/2008
I just finished reading a book by Roger Lowenstein "While America Aged". Fully 1/3 of the book addresses the issues with the GM pensions (the other 2/3 looks at NYC subways and San Diego). The book is long on the history of the problem and short on the solution. But in the closing pages, Lowenstein offers many suggestions, including national health care and "nationalizing" (my...
NakedShorts (Free subscription) | 11/05/2008
... Management, mostly for enforcing collateral calls, to earn himself five citations in the index to Roger Lowenstein’s ‘When Genius Failed.’ Imagine, all that fuss over $3.5 billion. New York Fed Names New Senior VP Federal Reserve Bank of New York Press release Oct. 31 2008 Inside Wall Street’s Culture of Risk BusinessWeek Jun. 12 2006
Dollars & Sense blog (Free subscription) | 10/29/2008
This is from former D&S collective member Bob Feldman: If you check out back issues of D&S and books like The Trouble With Capitalism: An Enquiry Into The Causes of Global Economic Failure by Henry Shutt, Origins of the Crash by Roger Lowenstein and American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips, you can see that Wall Street's banking crisis and crash of 2008 was a predictable one. Of course Clinton...
murketing (Free subscription) | 10/27/2008
I’m more than a week late in pointing out Roger Lowenstein’s interesting article for the Times Mag about oil and oil prices, but if you’re interested in the subject, I recommend it. In addition to explaining oil-price fluctuations more clearly than I’ve seen anybody else do it, he has some great forward-looking points. Back when oil [...]
Will Price (Free subscription) | 10/24/2008
Warren Buffet is well recognized as the world's best investor and as a man blessed with making the complex simple. Roger Lowenstein wrote a wonderful biography of Buffet, The Making of An American Capitalist . Now, Alice Schroeder, a former insurance analyst, brings us The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life . Warren Buffet allowed Schroeder unparalleled access to his records,...
