Oil

Oh yeah, and oil would be up to $135 a barrel, which a year from now, will seem pretty cheap, when we're paying $6 a gallon at the pump, and there are riots in the streets that Homeland Security is suppressing. Maybe the conspiracy theorists aren't so crazy after all.

Update: At close to $150 a barrel, $135 sounds cheap! [7/11/08]

The Economy: One Year Later

If I told you last year that housing would drop, major lenders like Accredited Home Lenders and New Century Financial would be gone, Countrywide would be absorbed into Bank of America, Bear Stearns would be bought at fire sale prices by JPMorgan, investment brokers and banks would write down record losses, the Fed would cut a combined total of 3.25%, finance the Bear Stearns take over, and virtually photocopy money for banks, would you have believed me?

Poole retires, Bullard on board

St. Louis Fed Names Bullard to Succeed Retiring Poole (Update2)

Bullard's published research indicates that he, like Poole and Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, espouses a numeric inflation goal. A research paper that Bullard co-wrote last year said that ``independent central banks will set low positive inflation targets in economies that possess highly developed financial markets.''

In a research paper titled ``A Model of Near-Rational Exuberance,'' written in March 2007, and revised in January, Bullard and his co-authors said that too much reliance by economists and central bankers on their own judgment has drawbacks.

Drawbacks, yes-- namely, they can't stop relying on their own judgment. If they did, the Fed wouldn't have bowed to market pressures and lowered rates, setting the stage for the impending CPI bubble and the hyperinflation that will follow.

Where Is the Next Bubble?

The next bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow's big crash

Trimming the Investment Firms

Last week, the Times had a great article explaining the credit mess to the layperson:
Can’t Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club

Today it came out with another good article:
What Created This Monster?

I thought a hedge fund would collapse-- I didn't know an investment firm would.

I disagree with the first article that the crisis has been going on for 7 months (which would mean it started in September)-- I think it started in August with the first big dip in the market.

More news that the crisis is spreading into other areas of credit:
CIT Taps Credit Lines and Talks of Asset Sales

Time to short Visa?
Visa Has a $45 Billion Debut on Wall St.

The trend for IPOs these days is to start them off big, then bleed them [investors] dry:
The Blackstone Group

(Which I always confuse with Blackrock, Inc, which is on the good side of this equation.)

Reminds me of the end of the tech boom.

Finbar Taggit

Yahoo Finance Tech Ticker had a video on Finbar Taggit, a hedge fund blogger that anonymously corrects incorrect stories in the press about hedge funds. See the video above, or the link for the story.

Some buzzwords:

• Rebates
• Performance fee
• Large ticket
• Lock ups
• Side letters
• Side pockets
• Seed capital-- $40MM used to be enough for investors from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, but now they want to see at least $100MM in your startup fund before recommending you. The average investor won't invest in a hedge fund unless it has at least $125MM in it. As he says, the days of starting a hedge fund with just a laptop are over.
• Risk/Reward criteria
• Market neutral

He says that contrary to popular belief, the credit crunch that started in August of last year was not due to hedge funds, but caught most of them in the muck with the rest of us. Now hedge funds are not finding many investors due to the "safety issue" of cautious investors, scared of the markets.

August may be a good model for January [Update 2]

I thought about posting this yesterday. Jeremy Siegel's Yahoo Finance column, "Why Bernanke's Critics Have it All Wrong," posted August 29, 2007, lays out the financial meltdown that started in August. Then, Bernanke surprised the market with a 50 bps federal funds rate cut.

No one likes to call a bottom for fear of being wrong, but the .75% rate cut just announced by the Fed may be enough to float the markets up for another 6 months. I like what Boris Boehm of Germany's Nordinvest said, as quoted in the Times, "There’s an old saying in the market that banks lead us into recession and banks lead us out."

Love 'em when they're up, love 'em when they're down

Citigroup lost $9.83 billion in the fourth quarter.

Merrill lost $9.8 billion in the fourth quarter.

No wait, make that $16 billion.

Yet Merrill paid $15.9 billion in compensation and benefits to 64,200 employees.

Seems like they should have nixed the bonuses and they would have come out even. Glad I'm not a stockholder. Looks like the only industry not accountable to stockholders are the brokerage firms.