We’re less than three weeks away from the start of the Agora Financial Investment Symposium in Vancouver. And it appears our choice of a theme for this year – Assault on Enterprise: How to Invest in an Age of Rising Taxes, Wall Street Crooks and Government Boondoggles – is more apt than ever. It’s not [...]
Ed. Note: This is an excerpt from Whitney Tilson’s presentation to the Value Investing Congress in Pasadena, California on May 5, 2010. Whitney Tilson is the founder and Managing Partner of T2 Partners LLC and the Tilson Mutual Funds. Two years ago, we stood up here on this exact stage and delivered a very downbeat [...]
Simplicity and honesty are essential investment attributes. Complexity and deception are fatal. Most publicly traded financial firms, for example, reside at the complex and deceptive end of the investment spectrum. They are complicated and highly leveraged…which means the chances of a costly deception (whether intentional or accidental) are very high. The corporate histories of Countrywide [...]
It’s getting quite ugly out there in the investing world. Yesterday I tried to draw a line of comparison from the near collapse of Bear Stearns to the problems of the Eurozone… That line became quite a bit clearer yesterday and in the overnight markets… Let’s go to the tape! Well… It was another day [...]
Front and center this morning is the fact that the NY boys and girls didn’t like the Greek bailout one iota yesterday, sending the single unit below 1.32… When the traders in Asia and London returned last night and this morning, they too did not like what they saw and sent the euro (EUR) even [...]
While we were seated in the auditorium of the Reagan International Trade Building for the 2010 Fiscal Summit yesterday, fear and loathing swept the globe. Today? Not so much. The scare from Greece’s downgrade? It’s so yesterday. The euro has bounced off its one-year low of $1.31. European stocks are up, too. Phew. An index [...]
Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in The Rude Awakening in 2008 Now that the American financial sector is safe and unsound once again, has the threat of serious economic crisis genuinely passed? And has the structure of American capitalism actually improved? Or did the Fed merely dress a sow in lingerie and call her [...]
- Can you feel it? The world is in a different place this morning. Yes, the sun is still shining, birds still chirp and the hype over Apple’s iPad is still building beyond an already insufferable level. Your world may appear normal. But there’s a qualitative difference to the economy today, brought on by the [...]
All for show, not for go. The Federal Reserve has raised the discount rate – the rate it charges banks for short-term loans – by 25 points, to 0.75%. “It used to be a sin,” our friend Chuck Butler commented this morning in The Daily Pfennig, “to have to go to the ‘discount window’ and [...]
Trichet to Greece: Drop Dead! Obama to California: Uh… Yesterday, stocks lost 103 points on the Dow. This looked like a confirmation to us. The stock market appears to have begun its next and final phase… AP seemed to think so too: “Stock investors see threats from all directions,” said the headline. We didn’t bother [...]
Today we offer thanks to Barry Ritholtz for sharing his views… literally. He’s moved into a new office in Manhattan where he can look out at the city in almost every direction. From The Big Picture blog: “Over the past few weeks, I have walked through the space with real estate people, contractors, building reps, [...]
[Editor's note: Trend forecaster Gerald Celente describes the events of 2009 as if he were writing economic history from the future. Read on to see how he portrays the fateful past year.] Early in 2008, with the global equity markets in free fall and financial conditions rapidly deteriorating, most Americans were persuaded to accept the [...]
I guess no one in Turkey $TUR has heard of Shittybank or Bear Stearns. This country loves their coffee and hookah’s. Any country that can fire up in the morning to coffee and chill in the evening to a tobacco buzz will always be resilient. What seems too high and risky to the majority generally [...]
Enron? Bear Stearns? Bernie Madoff? They’re all big stories about big losses and have hurt a lot of employees and investors. But none come close to getting my vote for the decade’s most dastardly deception… First came Enron, with $65.5 billion in assets, going belly-up and becoming the largest bankruptcy in US history at that [...]
Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi has gained a reputation for investigating Wall Street’s systemic abuses of power (for examples you can see Daily Reckoning posts on his Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers Autopsy and his description of how the US Economic Team is Packed With Wall Street Insiders). Recently Taibbi appeared on the Colbert [...]
As the dollar careened toward a 15-month low yesterday, gold zoomed to a new all-time high. Once the dust finally settled, the Dollar Index closed the New York trading session at 74.41 – its lowest closing price since August 7, 2008, the day AIG reported the third of its shockingly large quarterly losses. Back in [...]
“Two Americas; trust me it’s more than a campaign slogan,” writes Robert Lenzer for Huffington Post. On the one side are the dizzying market “rally,” and the Wall Street compensation and bonuses that have grown right alongside that beast. On the other side is the rest of the economy which, in stark contrast, is filled [...]
Matt Taibbi’s recent Rolling Stone article dissects the downfall of Bears Stearns and Lehman Brothers as if he were at a murder crime scene. He carefully uncovers evidence, reveals the deception, and fingers the criminals behind the homicides. Much ink has already been spilled on the topic, but Tabbi’s unique insights make his version of the events [...]
