“Hedge funds have made massive mistakes. We are less and less willing to invest with these people because at the point when you need them the most, they’re worth the least.” -George Feiger, chief executive officer of Contango Capital Advisors, wealth management arm of Zions Bancorporation. Feiger manages $3.3 billion at Contango and Western National … Read more
As you all have heard, Friday was (again) S&P’s day in the limelight. The rating agency downgraded over half of the 16 Euro area countries put on credit watch negative in December 2011. A quick look at my feed shows several takes on S&P’s action: the Economist’s Free Exchange comments on the now soft-core country, … Read more
Well, that was the week that was, wasn’t it? It started with a cheerful, upbeat market response to both the impact of the ECB’s 3 year LTRO and the growing impression that Hungary was going to make some sort of “one-off” deal with the IMF, and ended near the depths of despair as S&P’s announced the downgrade … Read more
As efforts continue to impose sanctions on Iran ([1], [2]), I thought it would be helpful to discuss the possible implications of these developments for oil-consuming countries. The most likely outcome of an embargo on oil purchased from Iran is that the countries participating in the embargo buy less oil from Iran while other countries … Read more
The members of the European Monetary Union, as a fundamental structural solution to the Eurozone crisis, have sought to leverage their blended credit in the capital markets (via the EFSF and ultimately the ESM) to push the present lack of peripheral sovereign creditworthiness (and, by extension, the creditworthiness of the core nations’ banks) far into the future. … Read more
From Project Syndicate: Macroeconomic indicators for the United States have been better than expected for the last few months. Job creation has picked up. Indicators for manufacturing and services have improved moderately. Even the housing industry has shown some signs of life. And consumption growth has been relatively resilient. But, despite the favorable data, US … Read more
The proposed plan is fundamentally flawed. It made no attempt to tackle the real issues – the level of debt, how to reduce it, how to meet funding requirements or how to restore growth. Most importantly there was no new funds committed to the exercise.Over the next few months, the Euro-Zone faces a number of … Read more
Below is the weekly guest column by Taylan Bilgic, which was published today at Hurriyet Daily News. My comments are, as always, right below the column. [The market had barely finished buzzing around the Turkish Central Bank of Gov. Erdem Başçı’s statement Jan. 6 on how 2012 would be “the year the Turkish Lira will … Read more
Financially futile, economically erroneous, politically puzzling and socially irresponsible, the December 2011 European summit was a failure. Only the attending leaders and their acolytes believe otherwise. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s post-summit homilies about the “long run”, “running a marathon” and “more Europe” rang hollow. The proposed plan is fundamentally flawed. It made no attempt to … Read more
It’s one thing to criticize Mitt Romney for being a businessman with the wrong values. It’s quite another to accuse him and his former company, Bain Capital, of doing bad things. If what Bain Capital did under Romney was bad for society, the burden shifts to Romney’s critics to propose laws that would prevent Bain … Read more