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It’s Lee Buchheit’s world, we just get to live in it
Thank you, Reuters.
We’ve long been admirers of Lee Buchheit, who helped mastermind the Greek restructuring at Cleary Gottlieb.
See Buchheit’s early co-authored proposals for Greece,
A small, last minute cash call…
Three Alphavillans are running around Canary Wharf in East London this evening in support of the British Heart Foundation.
Left to right: Lisa Pollack, David Keohane and Masa Serdarevic
Click here to make it worth their while.
Book excerpt: “Abnormal Returns”, by Tadas Viskanta
FT Alphaville doesn’t know if Tadas Viskanta, proprietor of Abnormal Returns, was the first curator in finance blogland — but we do know that he is still very much the best. And as Tadas was certainly among the first to start linking to us frequently back in our early days,
18/05/2012 (Before-FB)
Is life as we know it gonna change after 11am New York time on Friday?
Will Mark Zuckerberg be crowned emperor of the dweebs (just as Napoleon was crowned emperor of the French exactly 208 years ago today) or will he fall flat on his puli sheepdog?
While we await for that all-important first trade,
Odey’s angst
At present the lights are being turned down in the markets but the good fund manager, like the good pianist, will be the one who can play in the dark.
That’s Crispin Odey getting seriously gloomy and abstract in his latest note to clients.
Merkel and Hollande: you say growth, I say austerity, let’s call the whole thing off
Tuesday is a big day for France-German relations. Francois Hollande will be inaugurated president, and announce his choice of prime minister. Just hours later he’ll meet Angela Merkel, marking the genesis of a new portmanteau.
The US labour market and the middling middle
The sweet spot — you’re young, Hispanic, have a college degree, work in mining, are married and live in North Dakota.
It’s a rare combination, of course, but these are the characteristics commonly found among people who have found jobs in the difficult US labour market since February 2010,
You cannot be Syriza!
If Greece ends the reform process it has undertaken, then I can’t see that the respective tranches [of aid] can be paid out.
– Guido Westerwelle
If Greece does not decide to stay in the eurozone we can’t force them to stay in it.
GKP threatens to sue speculators (the bad kind)
“Live by the sword, die by the sword” does not translate into Kurdish, it seems.
Gulf Keystone Petroleum Ltd. (AIM: GKP)
(“Gulf Keystone” or “the Company”)
Response to Speculation
Gulf Keystone notes the continued and unfounded speculation on various bulletin boards and other social media sites regarding an alleged planned placing of the Company’s shares at 160p per share.
The growth of the shadow economy, charted
When the economy is tanking the shadow economy benefits. That’s the theory and a new study into the rise of the grey economy, from Ceyhun Elgin and Oguz Oztunali of Bogazici University and presented at VoxEU,
Moss to step down as Aviva CEO
Whoah.
8 May 2012
Aviva announces Andrew Moss to step down as CEO
John McFarlane to assume executive duties with immediate effect
Aviva plc announces that Andrew Moss, Chief Executive Officer,
EU plans to terminate Britain, return to Dark Ages – report
Sensational “news” via the Daily Express, which for the avoidance of doubt is a British national newspaper.
Yes, really. See for yourself.
SENIOR Eurocrats are secretly plotting to create a super-powerful EU president to realise their dream of abolishing Britain,
Greek elections: Be afraid, be very afraid
Greece goes to the polls this weekend. And it looks like it’s going to be messy. The potential for the “wrong” result to wreak havoc in the markets on Monday morning is real.
The outcome is very difficult to predict due to the incredible fragmentation of political support within the country and the rise of marginal parties.
Lloyds receives ‘multi-billion’ bid for publicity – report
According to the Evening Standard:
Lloyds Banking Group is understood to have received a multi-billion-pound takeover approach for Scottish Widows, its life assurance, pensions and savings business.
What are the odds of a former Goldmanite getting the BofE governor job?
The race for Mervyn King’s job is hotting up — months before it’s even officially advertised — as rumours circulate that a second Goldmanite could be in the running.
The focus on Monday was on Jim O’Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs’ asset management division,
This Australian mining magnate wants to build Titanic II
This is Clive Palmer, who plans to launch a new cruise liner that is a near-replication of the Titanic.
Of course, he said, it would be “designed so it won’t sink”.
Although:
“Of course it will sink if you put a hole in it,” the sometimes jocular Mr Palmer quipped.
From more Russians, with longer life expectancy
In this quad of graphs, can you spot the odd one out?
While its fellow BRICs have rapidly growing populations, Russia’s has only recently been bucking its trend of decline. In 2004, downside forecasts had the country’s population falling to 125 million by 2025 — something that doesn’t exactly shout “invest here!”.
Dammit Pandit, we wanna talk to you
The river was deep but we swam it, Pandit.
The future is ours so let’s plan it, Pandit.
So please don’t tell me to can it, Pandit.
I’ve one thing to say and that’s
Dammit, Pandit, we wanna talk to you…
Princeling wealth and cow massage
Just a quick shout-out for Bloomberg News reporters’ exhaustive dive into the wealth (some $136m accounted for) of the clan of Bo Xilai, the fallen Chongqing politician:
Bo Xilai’s relatives built their assets in a nation where per-capita income ranks 121st out of 215 countries,
What the hell kind of GD company would do this?
But Mr. Smith said the company has used the same technology to resurrect several late executives.
“We’ve brought past CEOs and things that like that back to life,” Mr. Smith said, without getting more specific,
Maxim Barsky: from TNK-BP to…Matra Petroleum (!)
He’s an expensive piece of kit is Maxim Barsky, but you don’t get the man once described as “TNK-BP’s chief executive-in-waiting” on the cheap.
Yet we might have expected a more positive reaction to news that this investment banker-cum-senior-oil-company-exec is buying his way into Matra Petroleum,
These are the voyages of the JP Morgan CIO
Bruno Iksil — a.k.a Voldemort — coverage at Bloomberg is getting a tad, should we say, compulsive.
The latest follow up sees the news agency trawling through the LinkedIn profiles of JP Morgan’s Chief Investment Office employees in an attempt to figure out exactly what the office does.
Hedge funds and the Whale, credit index edition
What is this a story of? Bloomberg’s headline:
JPMorgan Trader’s Positions Said to Distort Credit Indexes
The WSJ’s:
‘London Whale’ Rattles Debt Market.
To summarise, a number of market participants are pointing their fingers at JP Morgan’s Bruno Iksil,
Why QE is being mis-sold
Ah, the elusive liquidity trap. Does it exist? Is it here? And what does it mean for monetary policy?
Those are critical questions which are not currently being addressed by policymakers, according to a new paper by Paul McCulley and Zoltan Pozsar,
“The FSA is not about justice, it’s about justifying their existence.” Discuss
The statement above comes from reader WEB, in a comment on Tuesday’s post concerning the public hanging of Ian Hannam, the heroic JP Morgan Cazenove banker fined by the FSA for supposedly distributing price sensitive information in two emails.
The audacity of (Alex) Hope
The FSA has been busy. With all of the excitement surrounding the fine and resignation of JP Morgan Cazenove Capital Markets Chairman Ian Hannam on Tuesday, another arrest maybe didn’t get the attention it deserved.