Nouriel Roubini pulls no punches: Americans lived in a “Made-off” and Ponzi bubble economy for a decade or even longer. Madoff is the mirror of the American economy and of its over-leveraged agents: a house of cards of leverage over leverage by households, financial firms and corporations that has now collapsed in a heap. When [...]
From the Commodities Futures Trading Commission: Federal Court Order Freezes Assets of Illinois Commodity Pool Operator Brookshire Raw Materials Management, LLC and its Canadian Principals Based on CFTC Charges of Misappropriating More Than $4.6 Million in a Ponzi Scheme The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced today that it obtained a federal court order [...]
The Madoff scandal put the phrase ‘ponzi scheme’ back on the tips of everyone’s tongues, and the concept of stealing/losing/burning gargantuan sums of money in everyone’s mind. Since that time we’ve seen… A Florida-based money manager who travels in ‘elite’ circles disappear, leaving only a note and a Subaru – monies in the sum of [...]
Diehard fly-fishers already know this First, you mortgage your life for a collection of very expensive gear. Before you’ve gotten any return on your investment, you get all your friends involved and they buy sloughs of pricey rods and reels. They soon find the sport is a lot more difficult than it looks, so to [...]
The WSJ brings us this 10-point checklist that every gullible investor due diligence team should perform before investing in a fund: 1. Does the fund have an independent agency verifying the performance of their portfolios, and are they well known? 2. Are other service providers to the funds independent of the firm? 3. Is the [...]
WSJ: As investigators figure out how the money disappeared, the ramifications for investors are large. If the money were stolen from a brokerage, as much as $500,000 per client should be covered by the Securities Investor Protection Corp., a nonprofit funded by the securities industry. However, SIPC doesn’t cover investment losses, and many of Bernard [...]
I was pinged about this last night, and twice this morning. The generally consensus seems to be that a $50 billion loss “seems impossible” for a lesser known investment advisor that reported $17 billion of assets under management on their latest Form ADV. The bottom line is there is going to be a lot of [...]
Me thinks he deserves it. Two economics/finance minded fellows that I thoroughly enjoy reading are taking Ben Stein to task. Stein recently layed out the notion that the financial markets exist to provide retirees with their nest eggs – Paul Kedrosky corrects, noting the markets are about liquidity, not serving the baby boomers. Barry Ritholtz [...]
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