Archive - 2009 - Blog entry

How much money was lost in RE this morning in my neighborhood? At least $50mm. A very sad and troubling real estate deal has proved to be a wake up call.

That gasping sound you hear coming from the commercial real estate market just means it's alive and kicking.

I feel it appropriate to help distribute Karl Denninger's video response to the currently in vogue effort of the government-subsidized media to discredit those AMERICANS who question current government policy and who suspect that the economy will get worse before it gets better.

Like I said at the start of this post, the world is awash with liquidity, so keep buying them dips and pay attention to the hedge fund heave-ho. It looks like things are getting bubbly all over again.

Americans will have to reach into their wallets and buy some Treasuries. POMO is almost over. Someone has to buy this paper. The problem is that at the current yield the adjusted return is less than 1/2 percent per annum. Who's buying that?

There is debate (and confusion) over whether the average American has actually increased his saving rate or whether this is a mirage. Ha!... Felix Salmon points out that some economists actually think that buying stocks and bonds is consumption - not saving. Much of the confusion arises from the need to distinguish between "investors" and "savers".

The dirty little secret in the pension world is that kickbacks are more common than people think in the private markets and hedge funds where funds try to bribe underpaid pension fund managers. How do I know? Because I have been approached in the past (very subtle, using words like 'facilitate') and witnessed my fair share of shady deals across many pension funds where I asked myself why the heck is this pension fund manager so gun-ho on that fund?

Gold and silver are outperforming a basket of currencies.

The Mortgage Bankers Association went public with their recommendations for the mortgage industry. They want to pretend that nothing went wrong the last five years. In my view their proposal is dead on arrival.

Over a lifetime, active investors will make hundreds, often thousands of investment decisions. Not all of those decisions will work out for the better. Some will lose and some will make us money. As humans we tend to focus on the outcome of the decision rather than on the process.

Last night Zero Hedge obtained some interesting documents from the CDC web site. They contain blank 'forced quarantine' orders from Iowa and Florida regarding novel H1N1 -- including forced quarantine to a 'secure detention center'.

My advice to the U.S. pay czar is to leave Nancy Everett and her team alone. Unlike the senior managers at most of Canada's large public pension funds, the folks at Promark Global Advisors earned their compensation by not following the herd, realizing the beauty of bonds, and by focusing on preservation of capital.

After I looked at the data from 1900 to 2008, it is safe to conclude that September historically was the worst month for investors, period.

A proposal to swap Agency Preferred shares for repossessed properties owned by the D.C. lenders. This plan could work. Everyone wins. What do you think?

Provincial finance ministers should conduct a thorough performance, operational and fraud audit using independent industry experts on every major public pension fund in Canada. Some of these funds are hiding much more than others, but they all have secrets they want to keep from the public and they all game their private market benchmarks to reap big bonuses at the end of their fiscal year.