• The Five Most Overpaid CEOs
    Posted by on September 28th, 2009 at 12:26 pm

    CNNMoney.com lists the five most overpaid CEOs. They are:
    Michael Jeffries, Abercrombie & Fitch
    James W. Stewart, BJ Services Company
    Brian Roberts, Comcast Corp.
    John Faraci, International Paper
    Eugene Isenberg, Nabors Industries
    Once again, I didn’t make the list.

  • My Thoughts on HR 1207
    Posted by on September 28th, 2009 at 12:24 pm

    I want to address the issue of HR 1207 and the Fed audit. If I were in Congress, I would support the bill. I say this even though I find the much of the pseudo-populist impulse behind the bill repellent.
    I’ve read Mr. Alvarez’s testimony and I think he makes several good points. The problem is that too much of the argument relies on scenarios that are too distant from coming about.
    The crux of his argument is that all these bad things will happen once a full audit is allowed. Yes, they could happen but it’s not clear that these are immediate dangers.
    I’m still curious as to what the conspiracy crowd expects to find out. Matt Taibbi writes: “It’s becoming abundantly clear that at some point we’re going to start to hear details about monstrous front-running operations involving the major banks on Wall Street.”
    Hmmm. Call me a doubter on that. And if the Fed has been trying to manipulate the market, I’m afraid they’re not doing a very good job.

  • Get Your Resumes Ready
    Posted by on September 28th, 2009 at 11:54 am

    Goldman Sachs is hiring.
    It must be part of some plot.

  • Gambling on Zombie Stocks
    Posted by on September 28th, 2009 at 11:41 am

    The LA Times writes that investors are speculating on busted stocks like Lehman and Washington Mutual that are still trading.
    Shares of Lehman have nearly quintupled in the last four weeks despite having some business problem. Some of those problems include having no business or employees.
    Still, did I mention the stock? Boo-yah!!
    big.chart092809.gif
    These folks are literally buying shares that are worth less than the paper they’re printed on. If you’ve ever needed clear-cut proof against efficient markets, this is it.

  • WaPo Rewrites History
    Posted by on September 28th, 2009 at 11:23 am

    The Washington Post runs a very deceptive article today claiming that community groups warned the Federal Reserve about subprime loans and the Fed repeatedly ignored them.
    In fact, the groups were complaining about the interest rate charged on the loans, not on the subsequent housing bubble. The Post writes: “Subprime mortgage lending sneaked up on the Federal Reserve.”
    Not at all. The Fed knew about subprime and fully encouraged it. Here’s Greenspan quoted four years ago in, of all places, The Washington Post:

    “Where once-marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately,” he said in a speech. “These improvements have led to rapid growth in sub-prime mortgage lending; indeed, sub-prime mortgages account for roughly 10 percent of the number of mortgages outstanding, up from just 1 or 2 percent in the early 1990s.”

    That’s not all. In June, Connie Bruck wrote in the New Yorker:

    In 1992, a landmark study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston made it clear that there were systemic underwriting issues relating to the treatment of African American and Hispanic borrowers. Policymakers called upon the mortgage industry to change their practices and redouble their efforts to better serve minorities and underserved communities.

    If the community organizers had their way, the bubble would have been far worse, and their communities would be far more disorganized.

  • Earnings Revisions At Two-Year High
    Posted by on September 28th, 2009 at 10:18 am

    Bespoke notes that analysts are becoming more bullish:

    Our daily tracking of analyst revisions for stocks in the S&P 1500 shows that over the last four weeks, 578 companies in the S&P 1500 have seen their earnings estimates increase, while 389 have seen their numbers cut. This works out to a net of 189, or 12.6% of the index. As shown in the chart below, this is the highest level since at least the start of 2008 (red line), and is a major improvement off of where we were six months ago, when the net earnings revision ratio was closer to “-50%”. While analysts are typically thought of as being behind the curve, so far this year they have done a good job of leading the market. When equities bottomed in March (blue line), analyst revisions were already well off their lows of the year.

    I should add that analysts aren’t so much as increasing their earnings estimates, they’re softening the earnings plunges. Still, it’s how bull markets start and it’s another reason why this isn’t a bear-market rally.

  • Taleb Watch
    Posted by on September 28th, 2009 at 10:03 am

    Joe Weisenthal spots bigmouth Nassim Taleb in the news again.

    “Bernanke, Geithner and Summers didn’t see the crisis coming so why are they still there?” Taleb told a group of business people in Hong Kong. Bernanke is like “a pilot who didn’t see a hurricane,” he added.

    Joe shrewdly notes, “We thought prediction was basically impossible.” Not only is Taleb’s comment silly, which they usually are, but this time Taleb’s metaphor shows a fundamentally misunderstanding of what a central does. And as far as predictions go, Taleb isn’t doing so hot. Just five months, he was saying that today’s crisis is “vastly worse” than the Great Depression.
    Now that it looks like the recession has past, the GDP numbers will soon reveal how far off the market Taleb was. He also chimed in on financial regulation.

    Many people, such as traders, benefit from these black-swan events and it’s up to regulators to ensure rules and disincentives are in place to discourage them from triggering these occurrences, he said.

    That’s exactly the wrong approach. The problem is that our regulators have tried to design a system that’s impossible to break. Instead, their focus should be on making a system that’s easy to fix.

  • Time May Sell Time Magazine
    Posted by on September 26th, 2009 at 12:42 pm

    Unthinkable.

    Time Warner Inc will eventually sell the Time Inc magazine unit and could buy holdings in its core entertainment category, Gordon Crawford, its largest shareholder, said during a presentation this week.
    “Time Warner just spun off their cable division, they are going to sell their print division, they are going to spin off AOL and they’re just going to be Warner Brothers, HBO and the Turner Networks,” said Crawford, managing director of The Capital Group.
    “Now, they will make acquisitions … but they’re probably going to buy just stuff in their wheel house of those businesses. They’re not going to, I don’t think, go very far afield from their core competency.”

  • Guess What Bank Has Made $33 Billion This Year?
    Posted by on September 26th, 2009 at 12:20 pm

    Give up?

    Read more…

  • Sand Animation
    Posted by on September 26th, 2009 at 11:54 am