 |
|
|
|
 |
|||
Yesterday afternoon, I called Thornton “Ted” Oglove, who has been a mentor ever since I cold-called him six years ago when I started working on my book, Financial Fine Print. Though I was really only calling about my trip next week to San Francisco to speak to the CFA Society of SF, the conversation quickly [...]
The Fannie/Freddie debacle provides many “teachable moments.” One of the classes we can sign up for is “what’s wrong with corporate employment contracts” – or what’s right with them, if you happen to be the executive who’s got one. As Michelle noted yesterday, the feds said they wouldn’t try to recover compensation from departing Fannie CEO Dan [...]
Today’s my first day back from 10 days spent on a remote island off the coast of Maine and my inbox has been inundated with questions about Fannie (FNM), Freddie (FRE) and Washington Mutual (WM), all of which lost their CEOs, not to mention billions of dollars in shareholder equity. Everyone — even my mom, [...]
On Wednesday the SEC released its second-ever ”ComplianceAlert.” (Gee, what ever happened to spaces between words?) The alert, addressed to SEC-regulated firms (e.g. broker-dealers and investment advisers), used a low-key tone but raised serious issues. For example, SEC examiners found some large broker-dealers to be surprisingly sloppy about verifying the values their trading desks assign to subprime mortgage-related products. It’s disturbing [...]
On Tuesday, Countrywide’s sex party house sold at auction for $475K, a substantial haircut from the $1.1 million Countrywide was in for. Keep in mind that as Floyd Norris pointed out last month, that doesn’t include any losses from second mortgages. Real Estate Disposition Corp handled the auction on Tuesday and will collect a 5% [...]
