That Michael Jackson‘s finances were a mess was always very well known. What many don’t know is that some of our favorite financial runaway trains were active participants in Jackson’s monetary fantasy world. The Fortress Investment Group (FIG), which went public in one of the most spectacularly horrible IPOs of all time, was at one…
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Hot Links: Appraisals, iPhones & Dinner With Gasparino
Hot Links for Weekend Reading… Baruch gets the new iPhone but is disappointed that it fails the cafe table test. (Ultimi Barbarorum) Rick Bookstaber writes the definitive checklist of suspicious things a hedge fund will do when it’s in trouble and desperately flailing to dig out. (Rick Bookstaber) Barry Ritholtz uncovers an attempt by the…
Goodbye, Michael
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15SxqqwF63U] One of the most talented entertainers in the history of the world has passed. The above video shows Michael Jackson at the pinnacle of his career, on the Motown 25th Anniversary Special in 1983. That’s how I choose to remember him. Here are some of the biggest stars in the world and their reactions yesterday…
Debunking Poor Advice in SmartMoney
Nicely done, SmartMoney! It’s a shame this magazine has been so marginalized, you almost never hear or see anyone talking about something they read in SmartMoney anymore. I used to love reading the print version back in the day. If only they could find a clever financial blogger to drive traffic to their site…hmmmm. Anyway,…
John Mauldin on "The New Normal"
There is a new term being thrown about in the financial media and press almost as often as Green Shoots. A commentator citing the existence of economic Green Shoots is usually extrapolating positive data points that would ordinarily be de minimus to make the case that they are the first signs of Spring, coming up…
Another FOMC Day…Hold All My Calls Until After 2:15
From the New York Times: Investors are hoping for reassuring words from the Federal Reserve. The central bank is widely expected to leave its key rate unchanged at a range of zero to 0.25 percent. Its outlook for the economy, however, is less clear. Gauges of the economy have been improving, but they not yet…
TRB Quoted in Crain's NY
Pretty cool stuff… Crain’s NY has written extensively about the bankruptcy boom and what it means for the abundance of restructuring talent we have here in NYC. They quoted me on my thesis that the lawyer crowd has replaced the finance crowd in many of our best steakhouses. Here’s the piece, from the New York,…
New Roth IRA Rules
I thought this was a great overview of how the rule change for Roth IRAs will work. The upshot is that the income restrictions on who may open and contribute to a Roth are changing as of January 1st 2010. From WSJ via Yahoo Finance: Starting Jan. 1, the income limits that have prevented many…
Are You Paying Attention To The Big Shift Index?
Usually when an article starts off with a roomful of theoretical mathematicians having a whiteboard party, I zone out pretty quickly, but I found this story interesting because it’s conclusions could become very important for stock pickers and active managers all around the world. From HarvardBusiness.org: We were trying to get our heads around the…
Market Recap: Dollar Up…You Know the Rest
The Reformed Broker, AKA Sookie Stackhouse, here with today’s Market Recap… The stronger dollar/ weaker stocks and commodities trade was On Like Donkey Kong once again today. Estimates for global gdp growth were revised lower overnight, and as you can see below, the materials and metals bore the brunt of the beating as the Dow…
