we moved. latest posts below:

9.25.2009

Contribute more than what you take from the eco system

Patagonia pushing the envelop beyond sustainability.
Learn more at Patagonia's "the footprint chronicles".

Krugman's "How Did Economists get it so Wrong" redux

Reread it. Any one who "invests" or thinks they want a lot of it. Money that is, needs to read this and understand the incredible risks in blindly trusting "professionals" and history. History, as in "the market always comes back".

Two great quotes.

One in relation to behavioral finance:

Probably the most influential paper in this vein was a 1997 publication by Andrei Shleifer of Harvard and Robert Vishny of Chicago, which amounted to a formalization of the old line that “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
Second one:
...good time to recall the words of H. L. Mencken: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.”
[Emphasis mine]

Read or reread Krugman's piece at NYTimes.com.
Ignore doing your own due diligence at your own peril.

Circuit Court rules AT&T is a "person" re: a FOIA exemption

Hat tip to Virginia Coalition for Open Government.
From Law.com:

In an appeal before the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the FCC argued that when Congress crafted the exemptions clauses of the Freedom of Information Act, it intended the phrase "personal privacy" to extend only to human beings.

But AT&T begged to differ, arguing that the FOIA specifically defines the term "person" to include corporations, and therefore that "Congress's choice of the adjectival form of that word -- 'personal' -- should be understood to refer to that definition."

The FCC lost their argument. AT&T was considered a "person" for the sake of this FOIA exemption apparently intended to protect a person's privacy.

ASF creates code to track home loans through securitization adding more transparency

Could this added transparency with your personal information be abused? Will there be laws in place to make possible abuse illegal?

American Securitization Forum, ASF, created the:

...new global ASF Loan Identification Number Code (ASF LINC™) is a sixteen digit identification code that captures underlying loan type, origination date and country of origin, in addition to randomized alphanumeric data, to create a unique ID for a wide range of loans that may be pooled and sold into the capital markets.
It's intent is to track individual loans to provide transparency to everyone who is a stakeholder in the loan once it's securitized. It's intent sounds noble, & beneficial. One of the critical supremely complicated problems of the housing market, is the lack of motivation of holders of securitized mortgages to negotiate in good faith to help responsible people stay in their homes.

Other factors complicating fixing the housing mess, is the near impossibilty of contacting "owners" of the mortgage for various reasons. Finally, it is clear that the securitizing of mortgages allowed banks & mortage companies to dump decades of appropriate risk analysis out the window as they had no motivation to do so as the mortgage was securitzed and sold off in bundles releasing them of any possible downside.

I wonder if this added transparency could have a downside and if rules should be put in place to stop any possible abuses now.

From ASF:
The global ASF LINC is linked to the CUSIP and/or ISIN number of the securitized product, allowing investors to track the loan throughout its lifespan and provide a chain of accountability between loan originators and investors. The ASF LINC creates standardization and consistency in connecting and reporting monthly performance data of a loan. In addition, it provides a means to connect added value data and information from third party providers like credit bureaus. Assigned at no cost to issuers, the ASF LINC is stored in a central loan data repository administered by S&P FIRMS. The ASF LINC is not designed or intended to replace the primary servicer's loan number, but rather to provide users with a means to track and monitor a loan throughout its life after the loan has been securitized.

9.24.2009

Lawsuit against BoA for $1,784 billion, trillon dollars

How can we join in to make it a class action!?!
Sounds far doesn't it?

More at Reuters:

Dalton Chiscolm is unhappy about Bank of America's customer service -- really, really unhappy.

Chiscolm in August sued the largest U.S. bank and its board, demanding that "1,784 billion, trillion dollars" be deposited into his account the next day. He also demanded an additional $200,164,000, court papers show.
Remember how BoA doesn't think it owes us, $4B as it "was an oral agreement".

9.23.2009

Credit Default Swap comedy

So one time, there was this really groovy financial instrument that was illegal to regulate, that grew to well over 10 times the US debt, according to the comment at the article in the link below. Anyway, remember AIG ?? The company us tax payers threw a couple hundred billion dollars into since they were insolvent and we came within hours of a planetary financial meltdown if they were allowed to go under since there is no rule of law in place to deal with a catastrophe like that.

This is funny, from Bloomberg.:

“The only market that I know of that seems to have worked virtually every day has been the CDS market,” Eraj Shirvani, chairman of ISDA and Credit Suisse Group AG’s head of fixed income for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told reporters yesterday at the industry group’s regional meeting in New York.
Funny in that Shirvani's comment is close to the dumbest fucking rewriting of history comment one could make.

More pressure on foreclosures from recasting ARMs

From CalculatedRisk.com:

Of the $189 billion securitized Option ARM loans outstanding, 88% have yet to experience a recast event ... Of these loans that have not yet recast, 94% have utilized the minimum monthly payment to allow their loans to negatively amortize.
And:
Resets are not a problem with low interest rates. The potential problems are from loan recasts.

New FASB rules for sales of products like the iPhone & Palm Pre

This seems to make sense & simplify the accounting as the "product" that is a bundle of software & hardware obviously has to work together or either part is essentially worthless.

From WSJ:

Currently when a company sells devices like these, it gets the cash up front, but can only book the revenue and profits from the sale over time, typically over the length of a product's life.

Under the new rules, companies will be able to book much more of the revenue when the product is sold. A company that has strong sales in a quarter would likely record higher profits under the new rules than the old. The old standard helped smooth out the differences between good and bad quarters.
And:
A person familiar with the thinking of a FASB task force that approved the accounting switch earlier this month said it was "trying to align the accounting better with what the economics of the transaction were.
The new rule is expected to pass Wednesday. I'm calling this now - watch as people see a spike in sales/earnings, once the accounting has been implemented, & they don't do the appropriate due diligence on the value of the underlying stock & the stock will explode up for a period of time.

9.22.2009

Planet Better car - the right chicks will love you for it

From better place, the electric car company:



From my man.

My man? On Flickr.

Fun with accounting or Banks could bail out FDIC

This should simplify things.

Highlights from NYTimes article:

Senior regulators say they are seriously considering a plan to have the nation’s healthy banks lend billions of dollars to rescue the insurance fund that protects bank depositors.
-
The plan, strongly supported by bankers and their lobbyists, would be a major reversal of fortune.
-
Bankers worry that a special assessment of $5 billion to $10 billion over the next six months would crimp their profits and could push a handful of banks into deeper financial trouble or even receivership. And any new borrowing from the Treasury would be construed as a taxpayer bailout that could open the industry to a political reaction, resulting in a wave of restrictions like fresh limits on executive pay. Any populist furor could be avoided, the thinking goes, if the government borrows instead from the banks.
And if anything goes wrong, what's the worst that could happen?

I made a mistake and now I'm suing

From Wired:

A Wyoming bank sent an e-mail containing sensitive customer data to the wrong Gmail account, and now wants Google to reveal the identity of the account holder who received the data.
Google declined.
Hat tip to Va Coalition for Open Government.

Kids should learn their lesson & pay out of their allowance

9.21.2009

OpenInternet.gov & mission to ensure net neutrality

YEAH!

At OpenInternet.gov:
[If you do anything right now - hit their site, join it, become a Fan in Facebook, etc!]

President confirms he was black before elected

I'm getting back into following football

It's a great sport that builds athleticism, team building, etc but the NFL sure seems to have not been that great in the last "x" number of years for me.

Finally, as football was intended. I'm starting a fantasy football league too.

Restoring the golden rule with a Charter for Compassion

What a timely idea.



Heard her again on Fresh Air.

At Wikipedia:

Karen Armstrong MRSL (born 14 November 1944 in Wildmoor, Worcestershire) is a British author of numerous works on comparative religion, who first rose to prominence with her highly successful A History of God. A former Catholic nun, she asserts that "All the great traditions are saying the same thing in much the same way, despite their surface differences." They each have in common, she says, an emphasis upon the overriding importance of compassion, as expressed by way of the Golden Rule: Do not do to others what you would not have done to you.

Blog Archive