I blogged before about some medium-term concerns I have around Lebanon’s currency stability. A story I saw today shows an opposite view, so I’m linking it here. Moody’s have upgraded Lebanon’s bond ratings due to improved external liquidity. My original post was to temper the irrational optimism around the currency peg, rather than to say…
Currencies aren’t what they used to be. The US Dollar can no longer be viewed as a safe bet as Obama and Bernanke spend their way out of a crisis partly fueled by too much spending. Inflation will come, it’s just a matter of time. Warren Buffet thinks so too. The current relative strength of…
The Fed joins Bank of England and Bank of Japan in repurchasing government bonds. photo credit: amber.kennedy This actions (quantitative easing) increases the prices of bonds (more demand, diminishing supply) pushing down long-term yields. Great if you own bonds, not so great if you are an insurer with imperfectly matched long-term liabilities. Given how difficult…
CNN has a story on house price declines being at their highest in 30 years. Turns out the headline is misleading in two ways. Firstly it proclaims house prices at a 30-year low, which is fortunately not quite the reality. However, the largest decline in 30 years is still pretty shocking. The second item is…
What do the names Oneway, Bull, Kansvatter, Inthemoney, The Bull! and Millionaire in the making have in common? They’re all optimistic, aggressive names used in the Make A Million competition. They’re also, as of right now, all in the bottom ten out of nearly 300 entrants and have all lost everything but a few rand…
Bodie, Kane and Marcus wrote a wonderful textbook used in finance in universities around the world. I remember reading one of the “boxes” during a lecture at UCT many years ago. It described an ingenious money-making strategy: Start 16 apparently independent investment advisory newsletters. In the first year, 8 of them forecast gold (or oil,…
The Financial Services Authority (FSA) announced that it will ban short-selling of publicly listed stocks until January 16th, 2009 for the UK market where it is the financial regulator. It will then be reviewed. From The Financial Times: Hector Sants, chief executive of the FSA, said: “While we still regard short-selling as a legitimate investment…
Moneyweb’s article on Barlow’s re-striking of BEE options echos my earlier post on the trouble of underwater incentive options. The sense of the article is that this sets a bad precedent. Of course, the precedent has been set years ago – I’ve personally calculated the additional costs under IFRS2 for BEE deals in danger of…
