$$$ Iraq-Focused Hedge Fund Drops 4.2% In Jan. [FINalternatives]
$$$ Hi. I am a cute (former cheerleader/drum majorette in high school) 5-2. 111 lbs, light brown hair and green eyes. In my 20’s I had an on-and-off boyfriend but I got tired of him, especially after my experience with a fast-lane Wall Street guy.
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addslashes(Top 10 Most Searched Stocks on TheStreet.com, February 21
The U.S. Department of Commerce appears to have turned away from its plans to yank the plug on Economicindicators.gov, a Web portal describing its mission as providing ?timely access to the daily releases of key economic indicators from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau.?
News of the impending closure of the site had been making the rounds since last week. Sen. C…
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After a pullback that lasted for several trading sessions, investors are piling into short-term Treasurys again, once again causing the yield curve — the difference between short- and long-dated Treasury securities — to steepen, as bond players continue to bet on more interest-rate cuts from the Federal Reserve….
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Among the industries leading stocks lower today are education stocks, which are down after Apollo Group announced that it was leaving the auction-rate securities market and reducing private loan exposure. The company is down by 10.1% today even though analysts,…
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Investment and domestic demand will enable it to grow even faster in 2008.…
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Fourth quarter GDP results buoy the new Taiwan Dollar.…
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Faster yuan appreciation poses risks, but the alternatives are worse.…
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Nice catch by BreakingViews today on a bonus that SocGen owes rogue trader Jerome Kerviel for profits that the bank claims it didn’t know about: Rogue trader Jerome Kerviel was in line for a 2007 bonus five times the amount he got in 2006. The bank insists it never knew about the “hidden” E1.5bn in profits that he made through unauthorised trades last year. If that’s the case, why the bonus? …
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Roberta Yafie explains today how US bankruptcy judge Robert Drain slashed an $87 million bonus plan for Delphi executives to "just" $16.5 million. But don’t think they haven’t hidden all manner of other egregious overpayments in their 1…
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She’s been saying it for a while but Meredith “Take No Prisoners Unless You Plan To Waterboard Them” Whitney just reiterated on CNBC that everyone sucks, imploring you to short Merrill, Citi, and UBS. She also noted that the banks are probably going to be looking at $70 billion in writedowns before adding icily (in my fantasy), “and that is a wildly restrained estimate on my part.” And of the chosen ones, she said: “They are suffering from their own success,” which you might’ve been thinking to yourself but didn’t have the Whitney brand brass to put out there. Love her! (Big W concluded her report by saying, “Because you, Goldman Sachs, you’ve been on top too long. It’s time for the Whitney Express to take you down!” She then threw down her microphone and stormed off, to which Gorilla Monsoon replied, “Goodnight, Irene.”)*
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) has announced it will acquire Seattle-based Pi Corporation. This is a small merger, but this company is one we have actually had under watch as a development stage operation that could have gone public via an IPO down the road. Pi is a privately-held developer of software and provider of services for personal information management. Pi develops software and online services to enable individuals to control how they find, access, share and protect their increasing volumes of digital information; it owns SmartDesktop. Its products are also in beta as of now. Pi now has roughly 100…
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Lithia Motors (NYSE: LAD) Bad quarter, analyst downgrades. Falls to $9.78 from 52-week high of $30.54. ITT Educational Services (NYSE: ESI) Student loan market getting very tight. Falls to $57.66 from 52-week high of $131.82. Boyd Gaming (NYSE: BYD) No news. Falls to $23.32 from 52-week high of $54.22. Vasco Data (NASDAQ: VDSI) Big earnings miss. Sells off to $11.22 from 52-week high of $44.25. Novatel Wireless (NASDAQ: NVTL) Tough earnings and some downgrades. Flops to $10.20 from 52-week high of $28.14. Psychiatric Solutions (NASDAQ: PSYS) Market does not like most recent numbers. Sells off to $27.17 from 52-week high…
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Paul Kedrosky said this morning that he was thinking about "the anti-wisdom of crowds". I wasn’t sure what he meant, until this afternoon:
The sort of things people want government to do to help the U.S. economy — cut imports! halt immigration! drop/raise taxes by 100%!, etc. — would pretty much take us into the Great Depression 2.0. Asking people for economic ideas isn’t the solution, it’s part of the damn problem.
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(February 21, 2008 01:28 PM, by Arnold Kling) George Grantham writes it appears likely that at its peak the classical economy was almost as large as that of……
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Many congratulations to British Columbia and its finance minister Carole Taylor, who has introduced a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The sums involved are not insignificant: The carbon tax will start at a rate based on $10 per tonne of carbon emissions and rise $5 a year to $30 per tonne by 2012. Even so, the effect on gasoline prices is small. It’s 2.4 Canadian cents per litre at the beginning, rising to 7.2 Canadian cents per litre at the end: that’s the equivalent of 8.9 US cents per gallon at the beginning and 26.8
US cents per gallon at the end. No wonder "most drivers at a Vancouver downtown gas station told CBC News they’re not opposed to the higher price for gasoline when they can contribute to saving the Earth."
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Today was the launch of the Lehman Brothers’ first exchange traded note with the initial listing of the “Opta S&P Private Equity ETN” on NYSE Arca. This ETN will trade under the ticker “PPE” on NYSE, or go by (NYSE: PPE). The Opta S&P Private Equity ETN is set up to mimic and track the performance of 30 leading private equity companies that are included in the S&P Listed Private Equity Index Net Return Index. Here was a list of the constituent stocks on last look straight from the S&P website. There is a competing ETF called the PowerShares Listed…
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It isn’t ridiculous to expect that the market is going to be hearing more of announcements such as one that came from WebMD and Health Corp.,…
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Our eyes were already glazed over when we finally turned out attention to the the report released by Société Générale on the Jerome Kerviel scandal. The ocular varnish hardened to opaque as we skimmed through blather about how almost everything had gone right, everyone had done things well, and it was just a few bad eggs. It confirms much of what we had already concluded—that the back office lacked the knowledge and spine to really control the risk of the traders. “In some cases, according to the report, controllers who asked Mr. Kerviel about irregularities in his trades didn’t understand his explanations, but they dropped their inquiries,” the Wall Street Journal writes.
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