Did SocGen Spark Global Selloff? Fed’s move?

There is a theory circulating around Wall Street today about why markets got hammered on the 21st of January globally and on the 22nd in the U.S.  It is pretty interesting and may hold some grains of truth.  It also offers some insight into how the federal reserve may act at their up coming meeting.
 
At [...]

Rubenstein Accosted at PE Conference

This story was originally covered by The Deal, Dealbreaker, Dealbook, and PE Hub but The Prince couldn’t pass up the opportunity to comment on it.  This whole incident happened at the Wharton Private Equity Conference, a sold-out conference that had been advertised all over the place for the last month.  The one day event featured [...]

Merrill Writedown: Under Promise and Over Deliver

If you are wondering why analyst reports are expecting Merrill to take  an additional charge of $15bn on Thursday, just take a look at the chart below which shows prices out to mid-November.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Here is a rough estimate of how much subprime exposure, ex SIVs and conduits (excluding this is tricky considering that Citi took SIV [...]

Technical Trading Is Bogus, Here’s Why

Whenever The Prince hears bloggers or financial “professionals” reading charts and talking about breakouts, support, momentum, resistance, chart patterns, or any number of goofy names for the shapes that charts make he immediately begins to smile.  The Prince does admit that there is useful information to be gleaned from charts such as the number of [...]

The Face of Wall Street’s Mortgage Mess

Please check out this great series of articles from Bloomberg this past week.  They profile the wall street mortgage machine by looking at the sensitization process through the eyes of the players.  They focus on a mortgage lender named Sadek who was pumping gas 5 years ago but somehow made tens of millions of dollars [...]

Cerberus: Victim of Private Equity Hubris

"Hubris itself will not let you be an artist."  Cerberus’ hasn’t been much of a deal artist recently.
 
Cerberus sure has been busy recently putting out fires on the deals they did when the LBO game was at its peak.  Cerberus’ troubles are illustrative of the tendency of private equity firms to throw caution to the [...]

BrokeBack Banker from Columbia B-School Follies

I love this video.   See more from Columbia Business School’s Follies group here.