November 2008

Central banks around the world are whacking interest rates at a breakneck clip. The Fed, the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Bank of Japan and now the ECB and the BoE. The BoE made the most dramatic move with an outsized 150 basis point…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the sometimes obnoxious writer of the "Black Swan" is now a fund manager. His fund focuses on hedging against "Black Swan" events that are deemed highly unlikely by purchasing thing like out-of-the-money puts.…

Tomorrow is the day that we get a big piece of the data puzzle for the U.S. when the unemployment report is released. Most economists are expecting something very ugly with over 200,000 jobs lost. In the interim, we might be able to use…

Barack Obama promises to make some dramatic changes in U.S. foreign policy after eight years of a neo-conservative agenda. The question really is what would those changes be. Below, David Ignatius outlines a reasonable argument that Obama…

The Bank of England has cut interest rates to 3%, a 1 1/2 point cut. Just weeks ago, the BoE Governor Mervyn King was writing to the Government explaining how they had let inflation run out of control. However, with the economy tanking,…

Today was a very exciting today in politics as well as in the markets. We are living in a time to remember, like nothing we have seen in our lifetime. The question for us remains "what does the future hold?" I would like to look on the…

This past week I have been particularly distracted by the political headlines in the run-up to the U.S. Presidential election, so I apologize if I have missed a few stories in the financial press.The writedowns do continue unabated and we…

The U.S. Federal Reserve is tasked with watching inflation while keeping the economy growing. This dual mandate is a juggling act no mortal could manage successfully for long. The result has been a Fed which has largely erred on the side…

Canada has been one of the last housing bubble markets to crack. But, crack it has. The Toronto Real Estate Board reported that house prices crashed 13% from $434,022 on average last October to $376,896 this past October. With job losses…

Teddy Forstmann, one of the co-Founders of LBO giant Forstmann Little & Company, sounded the alarm earlier this year on the credit crisis. In an article from the Wall Street Journal that I chronicled here, Forstmann warned of impended…