Posts tagged 'Global Financial Crisis'

On SWFs being paid to borrow

Izabella Kaminska joined FT Alphaville in October 2008. Before that she worked as a producer at CNBC, a natural gas reporter at Platts and an associate editor of BP's internal magazine.

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| Feb 01 10:40 | Comment |

The big story on Friday concerns the terms and structure of Qatar’s life-saving support for Barclays at the peak of the financial crisis in 2008. As Daniel Schäfer, Caroline Binham and Simeon Kerr report, the key issue is whether Barclays lent Qatar the money to buy shares in the bank. Read more

The end of 200 years of expansion?

Paul Murphy is the founding editor of FT Alphaville.

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| Jan 21 10:42 | Comment |

Tim Morgan of Tullet Prebon has been threatening this tome for a while. And now it has actually appeared…click to read…

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Look on the bright side of 2012

Lisa joined FT Alphaville in September 2011 after a tour of duty through the guts of the financial industry, having worked as an analyst at a bank and for a financial data company.

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| Jan 04 2012 15:52 | Comment |

With so much pessimism heading into 2012, we thought it would be prudent to discuss the possibility of positive surprises.

That’s the festive spirit of the economists at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, writing in a report released on Tuesday. Read more

Warning: transparency in finance may lead to goat-herding

Lisa joined FT Alphaville in September 2011 after a tour of duty through the guts of the financial industry, having worked as an analyst at a bank and for a financial data company.

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| Jan 03 2012 13:04 | Comment |

Before the break, FT Alphaville took a look at abstraction and morality in modern finance. This prompted some rather interesting discussion, among which this post from Interfluidity:

Finance has always been complex. More precisely it has always been opaque, and complexity is a means of rationalizing opacity in societies that pretend to transparency. Opacity is absolutely essential to modern finance. It is a feature not a bug until we radically change the way we mobilize economic risk-bearing. The core purpose of status quo finance is to coax people into accepting risks that they would not, if fully informed, consent to bear. Read more

Abstractions and morality in modern finance

Lisa joined FT Alphaville in September 2011 after a tour of duty through the guts of the financial industry, having worked as an analyst at a bank and for a financial data company.

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| Dec 23 2011 16:00 | Comment |

Over the last three years, modern finance has been bailed out by policymakers and, by extension, taxpayers. But policymakers and financiers are taxpayers too, and hence themselves bear at least some of the costs of the crisis.

Why are we so good at creating complexity in finance? How do we reconcile the bad decisions that we make when we do things like structure single-tranche CDOs, trade the ABX index, or give mortgages to people who can’t afford them? Read more

Aliens to save the global economy

Izabella Kaminska joined FT Alphaville in October 2008. Before that she worked as a producer at CNBC, a natural gas reporter at Platts and an associate editor of BP's internal magazine.

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| Aug 25 2011 08:45 | Comment |

Alternative working title: When Orson Welles meets finance.

We discussed Fantasy Fed options on Wednesday. But here’s one from Paul Krugman, which we definitely overlooked — ironically, possibly the most fantastical of all. Read more