It Isn’t What We Are Learning - It’s Who Is Learning

4 January 2009

There is a lot of important conversation going on currently about what we have all learned about regulation in the financial industry, and what happens with a lack of it, what we could have done differently, why we (and the regulators) ignored often-prescient warnings, and so on.
This all presupposes that learning is, in some way, [...]

Shorting the Shorts

20 November 2008

Today, Citigroup begged the U.S. government to reinstate the ban on short selling in the financial sector. CNBC ran an interview piece on shorts yesterday, with experts generally agreeing that drops of over 15-20% per day in a stock was not because of value, but could only be because of shorting.
A day earlier, a US [...]

The Price of Speculation

4 June 2008

For the last few months I have become increasingly concerned that the large, unregulated pile of money sitting in the middle of the global living room (private equity, hedge funds, sovereign funds, private banking trades) is not only dangerous to the world because of its use in CDOs, derivatives, and other goofy instruments, but for [...]