Tag archive for ‘Capital Markets’

• Have You Heard the Dow Piano?

  3 January 11 • Comments Off

  

  CNN Money turned the Dow’s 2010 performance into piano music. It’s not Billy Joel. (I guess someone didn’t care for college bowl games over the New Year’s break.) But it’s worth a listen.

• Remember When $426 Million Was Real Money?

  4 August 10 • Comments Off

  

  I’m here editing The Gods of Greenwich and thinking about 2008, which is the year my story takes place. So in the current theme of light summer reading on Acrimoney, here is a snippet from Chapter Thirty-Five. The paragraph is based on something that really happened the day Lehman Brothers failed, September 15, 2008.

• Darth Goldman: The Enterprise Value Strikes Back

  16 July 10 • Comments Off

  

  Yesterday, Goldman Sachs settled fraud charges associated with Abacus CDOs for $550 million. Not surprisingly, the settlement excluded Fabrice P. Tourre, who will no doubt be hung out to dry as the Tourre de Toxic winds to a close.

  Personally, I think the government just got pimp-slapped. Here are five reasons why:

• Financial Reform and the Fungus Five

  20 May 10 • 3 comments

  Recently, I described financial reform as a “petri dish” of pending legislation. The government is tackling too many issues at the same time. Without constants—we don’t know how markets will react to all the moving pieces.

  It gets worse. Last night The Wall Street Journal profiled the back-room deals working their way through pending legislation. I guess you can hide anything in a 1,500 page document. And those legislative walkabouts are what trouble me.

  How can we trust financial reform when approval depends on non-related issues?

  Here are five “amendments” that have nothing to do with sub-prime debt, banking leverage, or even the flash crash of two weeks ago. I’ve dubbed them the “Fungus Five,” because they call into question the Congressional focus on “getting it right.”

• Does Orrin Hatch Want to Bail Out the Hamptons?

  18 May 10 • 3 comments

  In today’s New York Times, Andrew Sorkin describes the sweetheart taxes for hedge-fund and private-equity partners as follows:

  General partners at private equity funds, who take a cut of the investment gains they earn for their investors in the form of “carried interest,” have been paying federal taxes worth only 15 percent of that cut.

  This means the “gods of Greenwich” receive about a 24.6 percent tax break. That’s because the highest bracket on ordinary income—currently 35 percent—is expected to return to 39.6 percent. And the gods don’t pay taxes on their carried interests until they liquidate and pull out the cash.

• Morgan Stanley and Dead Presidents

  12 May 10 • Comments Off

  The news is out. US prosecutors are investigating several Morgan Stanley CDOs. Like the Abacus inquiry at Goldman Sachs, the issue is what representations Morgan Stanley made to clients. How did the bank market those Weapons of Money Destruction? Here’s what The Wall Street Journal reports:

  Among the deals that have been scrutinized are two named after U.S. Presidents James Buchanan and Andrew Jackson, a person familiar with the matter said. Morgan Stanley helped design the deals and bet against them but didn’t market them to clients. Traders called them the “Dead Presidents” deals.

  So without further ado, I’d like to play a little song for my friends from Morgan Stanley. I give you Little Walter and Dead Presidents:

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