rcwhalen's blog

If you really listen to his whining socialist diatribes, Paul Krugman is the enemy of every man and woman who works in the global financial markets. Many of my colleagues on the Street are very liberal, yet Krugman would take all of their money via higher taxes in a nanosecond. How is it that nobody sees that Krugman’s commentaries in The New York Times are almost perfectly predicted by George Orwell in Animal Farm – and Hayek in the The Road to Serfdom?

Not only is Washington not able to present a model of its own efficacy in solving debt problems, but quietly, the Fed joined other central banks a few weeks ago to extend short-term dollar loans to European banks virtually cut off from dollar credit -- and not by those Occupy Wall Streeters.

We believe that the issue of primary dealer status – the role of the primary dealers, the significance of foreign firms and their importance in the primary dealer process, versus domestic US firms – needs to be examined. It needs to be aired publically.

The combination of Mr. Obama’s continued denigration of America’s historic role, the Washington domestic economic policy tangle, the increasingly aggressive Chinese menace, all challenge the Obama Administration’s modeling a new American Pacific presence.

The spike in yields on sovereign debt of Italy was attributable, only in part, to the Italian political turmoil we are witnessing. The other aspect dealt with CDS on Italian debt. Those holders thought they had one type of CDS protection. They realized from the events in Greece that they had something else.

The overwhelming majority of media content being created now in 2011/2012 (film, television & music) is being BLINDLY financed with hopes that NEW reliable and profitable media streams will emerge quickly before the "old" income streams completely dry-up.

Indeed, the MF Global failure suggests that the US and EU banking systems may be facing a far larger problem than even the most bearish analysts suspect.

"To the extent that a political judgment is made that particular circumstances require government support of the mortgage market, that support should be provided openly by a full-fledged government agency."

The great sage Albert Einstein suggested that repeating something and expecting a different outcome is “insanity.”  The NY Fed is repeating its reliance on primary dealers to be transparent and accurate and to do so voluntarily.

What’s at risk, of course, is the whole concept of post-World War II universal  European representative government after the fall of Communism.

President Sarkozy’s call to China’s Prime Minister Wen Jiapao for help in bailouts and recapitalizing European banks is fantasy. Beijing plays a completely mercantilist hand. With its exports threatened and repeated promises to its own increasingly restless to shift to a more consumer-oriented economy, China’s more than $3 trillion in monetary reserves [20% in vacillating Euros] is mortgaged by a deflating dollar and its own incipient inflation.

Where does Larry Summers get off giving Americans advice on how to fix the continuing housing crisis?  And where does this political opportunist find the unmitigated gall to instruct us not to “finger point” and thereby identify culprits in Washington who helped enable the housing mess?

I personally believe that there is no "free" alpha. That said, there is a way to earn returns that may look like alpha, especially if you are an astute student of human nature. You can make a bet when other people are behaving irrationally, as when you buy when there is blood in the street.

Michael Lewis’ latest piece in Vanity Fair, “California and Bust,” begins with a lengthy defense of Meredith Whitney’s prediction that there would be a wave of defaults in the municipal bond market. I was not planning on writing a response to his article – frankly, defending Whitney’s call at this point is very much like defending Harold Camping’s prophesy on May 22^nd, after even the most gullible people have realized that they euthanized their pets for nothing. Who really cares about the intransigent believers that remain, for whom a forceful narrative has always been more relevant than facts?

In the last 12 months, the numbers of distinct users on Hulu.com (in the United States) have outpaced the metered Nielson ratings of all FOUR television networks combined.