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Today, the NY Times has an excellent article that starts to shed some light on how AIG was brought down.  I’ll be honest, when I heard AIG was getting rescued by the US government, it wasn’t all that clear how things could have gone so wrong for them. AIG was everywhere and looked to be [...]

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Sarah Palin, Republican VP nominee, has been sheltered since her debut at the Republican National Convention but that all changed this week. Katie Couric of CBS News got first crack at Sarah and it was a disaster, even for hard core Republicans it must have been embarrassing.   Palin explaining her foreign policy by “proximity to Russia” is [...]

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Several of my friends were in town this week for a real estate conference and I got a chance to catch-up with them and get the real deal on the Indian real estate market. They said most of the conversations at the conference went like this:
Developer A - We are okay, we didn’t grow [...]

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Kotak Securities which is known more for it’s corporate equity research has partnered with the newspaper Business Standard to produce a great two part PDF report on the overall political landscape of India.  It’s almost like a “Indian Political 101″ reference document that highlights some of the key political movers and shakers within the [...]

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I died laughing when I got this email last night…(hat tip Abbi V.)
SUBJECT: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP
DEAR AMERICAN:
I NEED TO ASK YOU TO SUPPORT AN URGENT SECRET BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH A TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF GREAT MAGNITUDE.
I AM MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY OF THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA. MY COUNTRY HAS HAD CRISIS THAT HAS [...]

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Shame on you
Fool me twice
Shame on me.
Ben and Henry (Benry???) as I blog are pleading their case to the Senate Banking Committee. It’s almost like a repeat of the justification for the Iraq War - If we don’t do something about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) the US is toast.  This time the WMD’s are derivatives as [...]

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Lordy, the Treasury Secretary has spoken and in a nutshell “you the taxpayers are going to bailout the big boys.” Henry Paulson said the alternative was a complete collapse of the financial system, when phrased like that his plan doesn’t seem to bad. And, with that the markets have raced up 4%. Of course the [...]

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Amid all the market chaos occurring over the past 48 hours, one news item stuck with me - Lloyds Bank threw down USD 21 billion to buy a mortgage lender. I was shocked I knew Lloyd Banks was doing well from his stint with 50 Cent and the rest of the G Unit crew…but [...]

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The US Government over the past several months has turned into a formidable distressed investing Private Equity shop. The General Partners (Uncle Sam and team) have said that the Limited Partners (taxpayers) will have limited exposure if any. Hmmm…not sure how the deals were structured but as a Limited Partner I’m hoping to get a peak at [...]

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Actually Lehman has sold the building. Lehman’s US broker/dealer operations were sold to Barclays for USD 1.75 billion, which seems like a good amount of dough till you read the specifics.  Barclays will spend USD 1.5 billion for the Lehman headquarters in Times Square and 2 data centers and the rest - USD 250 million for the [...]

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