International Investing

This excerpt is from Charles Darwin’s The Journey of the Beagle, published in 1839. As you can see from this passage he recognized the role of property rights in the ascent of man above a substinance living:

Whether we look at it as a cause or a consequence, the more civilized always have the most artificial [...]

From today’s WSJ. I keep searching for the punchline but it appears to be real:
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair is finalizing a legislative proposal that would allow the Treasury Department to make direct loans for close to one million homeowners in the latest government initiative to stabilize the slumping mortgage market.
…
For loans to [...]

A case in point about the incompetence of state control. According to this story, during a period of record high oil prices, the Mexican national oil company is actually LOSING money:
Mexico’s Cantarell oil field — discovered in 1976 and one of the world’s largest — is drying up. Pemex reported a 2007 net loss of [...]

Caroline Baum places the blame where it belongs:
From legislation to root out discrimination in mortgage lending, to the resultant relaxation of lending standards, to the tax-advantaged status of housing, “the aggressive pursuit of homeownership as a benchmark for success is at the root of the problems we’re seeing today,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist at [...]

Understanding the credit crisis means acknowledging that while the financial instruments involved may be new, the government sponsored inflation and regulation that brought it on is not. The classics of Bastiat, Mises, and Rothbard read like they could have been written this week. This great find by the Mises Institute is by Thomas Paine:
One of [...]

Gekko’s comments in the movie Wall St. still ring true, “They’re analysts, they don’t know preferred stock from livestock, alright?” Businessweek sums up a new book which details how little respect should be paid to the dart throwers:
McClellan, admits that price targets are “fiction,” and buy/sell/hold ratings aren’t taken seriously by professional investors. Analysts spend [...]

This clearly written FT article discusses why banks loved this tranche of CDO debt and why it is now such an issue:
Sometimes they did this simply to keep the CDO machine running. But there was another, far more important, incentive: regulatory arbitrage.
Most notably, because super-senior debt carried the AAA tag, banks were only required to [...]

Many people were surprised in 2006 when WSJ pointed out that being on the intranet does not lower capital investment costs. According to the article (Jeff Matthews’ notes are very good here)
“What does this have to do with Google? Well, Google management highlighted big capital expenditure plans at last week’s analyst meeting—which at a minimum [...]

Parallels between the current US situation and the Swedish bank crisis of the 1990’s:
“…the Swedish episode seems eerily familiar. … The first signs of trouble appeared among the finance companies that were responsible for the bulk of such investment. In September 1990, a company called Nyckeln — known as ‘The Key’ — folded when it [...]

In the equities market one crisis is usually replaced by another in short order, so that only the really big issues are discussed years later. For instance, the Bear Stearns collapse is already a footnote.
Not so, in the municipal bond market, which still talks about the 15 year-old Orange county default, and who, collectively, will [...]