American International Group (AIG) fell by more than 30% Thursday as concerns about Lehman Brothers and the credit crunch deepened. This is in spite of many experts claiming (yet again) that with the Fannie and Freddie bailout the end of the credit crunch was in sight. Standard and Poor’s response: On Friday, credit-ratings firm Standard…
Call it what you will, US taxpayers now own Fredie Mac and Fannie Mae. Too big to fail Fannie and Freddie became so large that their failure would reverberate around the US financial sector, and housing market, eventually spilling over into global financial markets and possibly the global economy. Well that’s the theory. This was…
I struggled to find a decent data-set of past economic indicators off the web. I’m sure there’s an easier way, but I had to trawl the horrible formats of Stats-SA and the Reserve Bank to get the mangled data underlying this graph. Seems like Stats-SA is either deliberately obfuscating their data, or they’re working on…
A frequent comment about why “property prices will keep going up” is that: They aren’t making land any more Building costs keep going up Our population is growing If these points are true, then this would provide a strong force to push property prices up. It still wouldn’t mean property prices couldn’t decline. Citizens still…
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…
Brief introduction to Exchange Traded Funds An “ETF” is an “Exchange Traded Fund”. In it’s simplest form, it is: a company… with very specific assets (e.g. gold bullion or a portfolio of shares with the exact weights of a particular index)… listed on (and traded on) and exchange in which one can invest to get…
FNB has confirmed that they will be pulling approvals for home loans on a large scale. Many seem to have been caught by surprise. Fools. To an outsider, it appears that FNB made a mistake in underestimating the trouble in the property market when they first gave these approvals. Their estimates of property price growth,…
A day behind the news Talk about the wrong weekend to be struggling with upgrading wordpress. Turns out, we have all that is bad about governments around Africa, the worst bits of South America’s corrupt politicians and distinct flavours of mob-era Russia rotting from the head. I missed this story until this evening. The Sunday…
