I haven’t even started reading, let alone thinking about all of this, but Dealbook has a post up about John Paulson and his investment strategy for the coming year. Since this seems to be one of the very few hedge fund managers to get things right, I suspect that this is worth your time. I […]
Archive for January 30th, 2009
Posted in 
Tags: 
Olympics Venue Becomes A Toxic Real Estate Asset
Posted by Tom Lindmark on January 30th, 2009
Were you beginning to think that we were the only country that could royally screw up real estate? It’s early in the 21st Century but the Chinese have the early lead in the worst real estate deal so far. It seems that the Birds Nest has turned into one of the biggest white elephants ever. […]
Friday Failures: A Hat Trick For The FDIC
Posted by Tom Lindmark on January 30th, 2009
The FDIC (actually the state of Utah was involved in one) closed three banks today. The Utah bank was a big enough lemon that they couldn’t find anyone to pick up the pieces. From Market Watch, here are the details: Utah’s MagnetBank became the fourth bank failure of the year, and the Federal Deposit Insurance […]
GDP Numbers: Some Perspective
Posted by Tom Lindmark on January 30th, 2009
Not trying to put a happy face on the economic numbers today but some historical perspective is useful. I did some prowling around and came up with this. From Econobrowser: On the other hand, today’s number does not mean that the real value of goods and services produced in the U.S. fell by 3.8% in […]
Thoughts From Others On Mortgage Cram-Downs
Posted by Tom Lindmark on January 30th, 2009
I started compiling some of the articles that I’ve seen recently on cram-downs. I figured that since Congress seems intent on providing for the cram-down of residential mortgage debt in Chapter 13 it would be worthwhile to gather all of this in one place and then look back in a few months. On the off chance […]
If Only Our Leadership Understood This
Posted by Tom Lindmark on January 30th, 2009
Justin Fox at the Curious Capitalist blog had a good, short post on his interview with Peter Thiel, the founder of Facebook. What struck me the most was Thiel’s opinion as to how we get out of this mess. Then what is going to restart it or who is going to fix it? I think if […]
GDP Numbers Come In Lower Than Expected: There’s A Reason Why
Posted by Tom Lindmark on January 30th, 2009
What appeared to be a good data point this morning, turned out on further analysis to be anything but that. Fourth quarter GDP declined at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.8%. Economists had suggested the decline would be in the 5.5% range. The fly in the ointment was inventories which increased by $6.2 billion […]
