The last entry in this journal was rather pessimistic. In it, we recounted what was likely to happen from the Fed’s irresponsible attitude towards cutting interest rates without a workable plan in mind about what to do next. Our verdict was that nothing good was to come out of it. However, that still left open […]
By admin | Published:
December 31, 2007
The last six months have brought American finance to the edge of the abyss. Mortals who, not so long ago, had seemingly achieved demiurge deal-making status are now experiencing their Götterdammerung. A single question now poses and imposes itself: what will the next six months reveal about our financial understanding? As always, only two possibilities […]
By admin | Published:
August 24, 2007
By Caroline BaumAug. 24 (Bloomberg) — Ever since financial markets went into their summer swoon, economists, analysts and journalists have been trying to explain why a small number of defaults on a small number of home loans morphed into a global liquidity and credit squeeze. How on earth did the subprime mess come to this? It’s […]
By admin | Published:
August 13, 2007
R&R Consulting will launch a CDS of ABS valuation engine, CDSMetrics. This includes CDS contracts written on individual tranches of RBMS transactions. CDSMetrics is a web-enabled application successfully used by hedge fund clients of R&R to value CDS of RMBS contracts. CDSMetrics uses a loss distribution in concert with Monte Carlo simulation to generate a sequence […]
By admin | Published:
August 6, 2007
Over the past few months, the financial battleground in Hollywood has been shifting under our feet as fast as a California Earthquake. Film studio bosses are engaged in a struggle to eliminate the residuals now paid to screenwriters over the life of the production. The residuals are computed according to various, mostly Byzantine formulas. They can […]
By admin | Published:
November 7, 1970
A cautionary tale about finance The collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, due to unforeseen resonance effects, is more than a watershed in the history of bridge design and civil engineering. It is an object lesson in the need to fully understand a problem before designing its solution. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, November 7th 1940 Bridges and […]