the rational post » speculation

in like a lion, out like a lamb?

The Editor — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:51:21 +0000

Students of behavioral finance must have had a field day this past week. In the wake of a month of dismal economic reports, Wall Street got its risk on with a few better than expected reports on manufacturing sentiment, home sales, and employment. Hopium, it appears, is a powerful drug.

Economists spent August cautiously lowering their outlook for the second half of the year as Obama’s “recovery summer” failed to bear fruit, the Federal Reserve failed at both of its twin mandates (stable prices and full employment), and bullish analysts failed to convince investors that the market was ready to climb to fresh highs. As a result, stocks ended the worst August in nine years with rising calls…

oil slick = euro trick

The Editor — Sat, 15 May 2010 01:15:35 +0000

Stopping the spread of financial contagion is deceptively similar to plugging a ruptured deep-sea oil well: the cost is epic, the risk of failure is catastrophic, and expectations of success may be more hopeful than realistic. Recent efforts to address both crises share so many elements that a few tweaks to the following report on the Gulf catastrophe also freakishly describes efforts by the Eurozone to head off the risk of cascading sovereign defaults…

[European Central Bank] to [inject $1 trillion] to stop flow from [Club Med economies]
Adapted from an article on guardian.co.uk Friday 7 May 2010

The [$1 trillion facility] that remains [Europe's] best hope of containing the disaster in [Greece, Spain and

…

a dose of reality

The Editor — Wed, 05 May 2010 15:06:39 +0000

Armies of bulls and bears are camped out on either side of the great debate over the future of the global economy. Armed with the latest statistics and plenty of financial incentive, both sides are engaged in massive media campaigns to rally anyone left on the fence — principally retail investors who were either burned in the great collapse of 2008-09 or sat out the fast and furious rally over the past 14 months. As the rhetoric heats up, it becomes increasingly difficult to choose sides. A careful examination of these competing wagers provides a more holistic perspective for anyone brave enough to join the fight.

Victory lap

Having survived the worst correction in generations, major indices are now…

market makers

The Editor — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:38:26 +0000

As ideological battles are waged over the benefits of free markets, the challenges of financial regulation, the inefficiency of policymaking, and the design of a sustainable path forward, pundits often attack one another without a fundamental understanding of the mechanics of our modern financial system. This primer helps to explain the unique roles that banks and capital markets play in the efficient (and sometimes painfully inefficient) functioning of of modern society. While it won’t settle any debates, it certainly reminds us how little we may know about the way the economy works…

Did the Capital Markets Fail Us?
By Karen Johnson | Thursday, March 25, 2010

Amid the debate about excessive bonuses and inadequate risk management, it…

the spanish prisoner

The Editor — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 06:03:49 +0000

“Zapatero is not a good driver. It’s like a boat, which in calm waters steers fine, but when it gets bumpy, they are not prepared.” The same could be said for many of the world’s C-level leaders, so it’s perhaps not surprising that both companies and countries are finding out the hard way that credit can dry up when the sea gets choppy…

Not a bull in sight as the bears go after Spain
From the nosebleed seats of the E.U., government cries out ‘We are not Greece’

By Barbara Kollmeyer, MarketWatch

MADRID (MarketWatch) — Eduardo Fernandez Agudo is old enough to have lived through other economic crisis in Spain, but the current one has…

volcker rules

The Editor — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:20:15 +0000

A perennial hot ticket on the lecture circuit at economic clubs and grad schools around the planet, Paul Volcker‘s influence is finally starting to resonate where it counts: at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. As his testimony in front of the Senate Banking Committee looms, the broader premise of a more responsible financial services sector pursuing sustainable, profitable growth needs to get out in clear journalistic prose from a messenger untarnished by the last 18 months of political and economic triage. This Sunday NYTimes op-ed attempts to do just that, despite the complexity of the topic. Unfortunately, it falls a little short for those either too stubborn or greedy to…

christianity and the crash

The Editor — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 16:25:54 +0000

“America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong.”

Did Christianity Cause the Crash?
by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic Monthly

IMAGE CREDIT: MARK PETERSON/REDUX

LIKE THE AMBITIONS of many immigrants who attend services there, Casa del Padre’s success can be measured by upgrades…

ten market rules to remember

The Editor — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:19:03 +0000

“Bob Farrell was a legend at Merrill Lynch & Co. for several decades. Farrell had a front-row seat to the go-go markets of the late 1960s, mid-1980s and late 1990s, the brutal bear market of 1973-74, and October 1987′s crash. He retired as chief stock market analyst at the end of 1992, but continued to occasionally publish. Rumor has it for a humongous donation to Farrell’s favorite charity, you can get on his very exclusive email list. Marketwatch gathered some of Farrell’s more famous observations, and republished them as 10 Market Rules to Remember.” – via The Big Picture

Noted financial blogger Barry Ritholtz comments on macroeconomic housekeeping, the unexplored links between shrinking demand and credit-starved supply, and support for commodities and commodity-linked markets/currencies once institutional capital resumes its existential search for yield…

The Eternal Optimism of Opening Day

As we are one week removed from Opening Day, the eternal optimism this time of the year is always apparent. The weather gets nice and the forever belief of a fan is always ‘this is the year.’ Cub fans can relate, with no disrespect to them as I am the Cubs of my baseball fantasy rotisserie league, aka never won. There is also the hope now that 2009 will be the bear killer as we are just a…

black (scholes) hole

The Editor — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:36:18 +0000

Scientists and market commentators have long been aware of the susceptibility of the markets to any single investment philosophy. The rise of early program trading contributed to the historic one-day loss of nearly 23% on Black Monday in 1987. Recent experiments with risk securitization may cost trillions of borrowed dollars to unwind and decades to fully digest. In this piece by veteran commentator Michael Lewis, the blame is placed squarely on the flawed assumptions of the Black-Scholes model, and the degree to which its methodology spread from the arcane trading desks of the world’s biggest investment banks to the private retirement savings of the beleaguered middle class…

Inside Wall Street’s Black Hole
by

originative sin

The Editor — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:25:25 +0000

The latest in a long series of articles on the Rational Post sharing a common refrain: those who forget economic history are condemned to repeat it…

Originative sin: the future of banking

By John Plender at FT.com, January 4 2009

For the late John Kenneth Galbraith, an acute observer of market folly, finance and innovation were fundamentally incompatible. Every new financial instrument, he said, “is, without exception, a small variation on an established design, one that owes its distinctive character to the … brevity of financial memory”. The world of finance “hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version”.

After the devastating collapse of a credit bubble…

housing freefall

The Editor — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:31:36 +0000

This time series from Robert Shiller puts recent house price fluctuations and their associated derivatives in an important historical perspective…

bucket shops

The Editor — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:55:46 +0000

Over-the-counter gambling on the markets has been around much longer than modern derivatives pundits would have you believe. The New York Times was warning against “casino capitalism” as early as 1905, when side bets on market movements were both commonplace and unregulated, and won the attention of an American government still swaggering after its victory over the mega-trust companies of the late 19th century. The following 60 Minutes segment discusses both the nature of CDS instruments and how they’ve become just as dangerous today as they were in the “bucket rooms” or gambling houses of the 1920s…

how to close a hedge fund

The Editor — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:23:15 +0000

Few people will escape from this crisis with enough reputability to scream “I told you so” at the top of their lungs like hedge fund neophyte Andrew Lahde. In this epilogue to his one year experiment in asset management – during which time his fund returned 866% betting on the subprime collapse – he rails on the industry, its myopic leadership, the vice of greed, and even the virtues of a little green plant…

Dear Investor:

Today I write not to gloat. Given the pain that nearly everyone is experiencing, that would be entirely inappropriate. Nor am I writing to make further predictions, as most of my forecasts in previous letters have unfolded or are in the process…

the view from 1929

The Editor — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:34:34 +0000

“Spectacular episodes in financial history” come about more often than we might expect, and certainly more often than we remember. Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a brilliant primer on financial speculation in the early 1990s, suggesting that our memory for financial disaster was far more limited than our intelligence might otherwise suggest:

“Built into the speculative episode is the euphoria, the mass escape from reality, that excludes any serious contemplation of the true nature of what is taking place….Contributing to and supporting this euphoria are two further factors little noted in our time or in past times. The first is the extreme brevity of the financial memory. In consequence, financial disaster is quickly forgotten…”

While…