The mainstream Hollywood film industry dominates the global market. The reason is best summed up at the beginning of a report from 2001 (Why Hollywood Rules the World, and Whether We Should Care). Back then, Hollywood still had “...
The immediate and tragic effect of the Aurora, Colorado theater massacre is grimly obvious (except maybe to Playboy models). But the long term effects are just beginning to take shape. With a dozen people dead and over two dozen wounded, it seems almost ghoulish to contemplate...
Structured credit ratings spectacularly failed AAA and AA investors, and they also hollowed out the market for mezzanine risk. A healthy structured market needs investors willing to sacrifice yield for certainty. It also needs investors willing to sacrifice certainty for yield, without whom risk transfer in structured finance...
SIFMA's decision to exclude mortgages coming from a jurisdiction where the threat of eminent domain being exercised is material was a hot topic on Naked Capitalism on 7/20 (last Friday) where it turned into a wrangle about public policy that, IMHO, missed the point of...
Recently, I received a comment that what investors want to see is a strong, solid script. It sounds like great advice. Too bad it doesn't actually work that way, but golly gee whiz it should. Unfortunately, one of the first things that any aspiring screenwriter...
Patrick Klaybor sent me an email, asking: I am trying to determine the value of a video that I shot of Les Paul at a dinner in Madison Wi. Wanna help? Since we finance portfolios using securitization but don't do single-asset valuations, I connected him to...
Last week, I made a little mistake. I said that The Amazing Spider-Man was the type of film that would open on 3,000 to 4,000 screens. Actually, it opened on nearly 4,400 screens. Since there are roughly 40,000 screens in the US, this sucker took up space...
Summer is a time for daydreams. Bucolic months full of hopeful visions of the future.So why am I spending this summer sweating non-stop in periodic blackouts caused by severe storms in a massive heat wave while my phone is ringing off the hook with every political...
VSOP consists of long and short positions on 50 tranches from a variety of issuers and servicers. The deals come from a range of vintages going back before 2000 but most from 2006 or 2007. There is a high concentration of Class A tranches for...
On July 4th, R&R Consulting will launch VSOP, its virtual long-short fund designed to exploit current arbitrage opportunities in the RMBS market. To select tranches for the fund, we searched for deals that we determined to be over- or undervalued based on our internal estimates of...