Then Prichard did something that pension experts say they have never seen before: it stopped sending monthly pension checks to its 150 retired workers, breaking a state law requiring it to pay its promised retirement benefits in full.

I think it would be too easy to say that a skeptical person would and should have avoided investing in a Madoff fund. The big mistake here was in throwing all caution to the wind, as in the stories of many people (some quite elderly) who invested every last dollar with Madoff or one of his feeder funds. Such blind faith in one person, or investment scheme, has something of a religious quality to it, not unlike the continued faith that many of the “Drakers” continued to have in Oscar Hartzell even after the fraudulent nature of his scheme began to become very evident. So the skeptical course of action would have been not to avoid a Madoff investment entirely but to ensure that one maintained a sufficient safety net in the event (however low a probability it might have seemed) that Madoff turned out to be not the Messiah but Satan. As I avoided drinking a full glass of Madoff Kool-aid, maybe I’m not as lacking in wisdom as I thought.

The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal. Looking back at that belief during hearings this fall on Capitol Hill, Alan Greenspan said out loud, “I have found a flaw.” Congressman Henry Waxman pushed him, responding, “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right; it was not working.” “Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan said. The embrace by America—and much of the rest of the world—of this flawed economic philosophy made it inevitable that we would eventually arrive at the place we are today.

Francois Delepine
Vice President, Financial Planning and Analysis

Francois is responsible for financial business partnerships with Google's engineering, operations, products, marketing and G&A organizations, and he also manages the corporate FP&A activities and the financial systems group. He joined Google from Hyperion, where he was in charge of emerging businesses; including three fast-growing product lines the company had acquired through its M&A activities.

Earlier, Francois was Vice President of Corporate Finance, overseeing Hyperion's financial planning and analysis worldwide, as well as treasury, procurement, real estate, and the enterprise performance management group. Prior to joining Hyperion, Francois was CFO at Kadiri, a human capital management software company and CFO of Xtime, a service CRM software company.

Google hired a new vice president of financial planning and analysis, Francois Delepine, who sought to standardize and more tightly manage the budget process. Finance teams started allocating more new hires to groups that generated the most revenue per head, say people familiar with the matter. To better predict revenue, the company implemented quotas for ad-sales representatives and tied the pay of more employees to performance, these people said. Different departments were required to budget the same amount for the same item, whether it was a server computer or a business-class ticket to Europe.

"Wentworth received an additional margin call of $16.9 million on Oct. 22, 2008, the payment of which was waived until Nov. 21, 2008. The payment has not yet been made," S&P added. Wentworth makes most of its money by selling asset-backed securities. Because such asset-backed transactions are tough to make in the current market, Wentworth has been reporting losses, S&P said. Wentworth is owned by New York investment firm JLL Partners.

unreleased entry point for mobile phone version of freshbooks

"It's just like after September 11. Back then no one wanted to be seen as not patriotic, and now no one wants to be seen as not doing all they can to save the financial system," said Lee A. Sheppard, a tax attorney who is a contributing editor at the trade publication Tax Analysts. "We're left now with congressional Democrats that have spines like overcooked spaghetti. So who is going to stop the Treasury secretary from doing whatever he wants?"

local financing organizations take notice of accounting and management problems. "Earlier this month, LDFA board member Mike Reid - who was treasurer and a member of the LDFA's audit committee - resigned over of what he characterized as the board's decision not to hold Spark responsible for its accounting."

Finally, there are the great realist novelists, who often see more clearly than journalists. So far, my Google search has not picked up any excerpts from Zola’s novel Money being read on the nightly news. In this brilliant chronicle of a speculative stock bubble, launched by a character named Saccard in 1860s Paris, Zola cuts right to the heart of America’s boom-and-bust neurosis: “Wasn’t such great and rapid prosperity the result of the methods for which [Saccard] was now being blamed. All of this came together. If one accepted the success, one had to accept the risks. When you overheat a machine, it sometimes explodes.”

A system for employing the projected receipts of a public facility to finance the construction of the facility itself, or the acquisition of a team to play in the facility. A preferred system includes: a method for projecting future cash flows (e.g., gate receipts) associated with the operation of the facility; pooling rights to receive those cash flows; transferring the pooled rights to a special purpose vehicle; and issuing securities on behalf of the special purpose vehicle in order to generated revenues for the construction and/or operating costs of the facility, or for the purchase of the team itself. The system also includes a computerized method for the ongoing implementation of such a financing system, including the steps of: inputting estimated cash flows and actual cash receipts; comparing the estimated and actual values in order to determine adjusted amounts to allocate between investors in the special purpose vehicle and ongoing operations.

Ross Panel Tackles the Financial Crisis: What Happened? Why? What's Next?

Just 19 more days like this one and the Dow Jones industrial average will be at zero. And we can all start over from scratch.

Judged by the amount of money directly dependent on it, the British Bankers’ Association’s London Interbank Offered Rate matters more than any other set of numbers in the world. Libor anchors contracts amounting to some $300 trillion, the equivalent of $45,000 for every human being on the planet. It’s a critical part of the infrastructure of financial markets but, like plumbing, doesn’t usually get noticed. Only a handful of economists, and no other academics, have ever looked in any detail at Libor, and even the financial press didn’t show much interest in how Libor is calculated until this spring, when there was sharp controversy over whether these crucial numbers could be trusted.

The mortgage bank across the street is just the same. It has thousands of these little packages, these bets it has on these streams of sunny days, which are the regular mortgage payments from its homeowners. And these bets are also insured--only it's not insurance, heh heh, it's um, a "credit-default swap." If it were insurance, well, there would be all kinds of annoying gubmint regulations, such as No Payment In A Hurricane.

But now, with so many firms going bankrupt, such bets have turned out to be killers. Literally, it would seem. AIG is mainly an insurance company. So maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that it wrote lots of credit default swaps. Indeed, it even borrowed money to do so. But when the people with whom it bet - its so-called "counter-parties" - appeared ready to cash their bets, the lenders to AIG said, in effect: "Time for you at AIG to put up more collateral on your loans, because those bets of yours are looking shaky."

But the news is even more startling for investors. After all, if there is one part of the financial system which is supposed to understand risk correlations it should be the insurance world. Yet AIG has stumbled at least twice in that respect. On a micro level, the insurance group apparently failed to see that its models underestimated the dangers of “supersenior” debt – the issue here is technical, but revolves around how models track the correlation of defaults.

On a wider level, AIG also failed to see how the fate of supersenior could be linked to behaviour in other parts of the financial world. For what has made the price falls so vicious this year is that all the institutions that had previously piled this “boring” supersenior on their books have needed to sell at once. Hence the development of a vicious, downward spiral.

S&P outlined the alchemy of structured finance in a March 2002 paper for clients entitled ``Global Cash Flow and Synthetic CDO Criteria.'' While arguing that the process wasn't ``turning straw into gold,'' the authors said ``the goal'' was to create a capital structure with a higher credit rating than the underlying assets would qualify for without financial engineering.

coinflation [ koin-fley-shuhn ] noun. 1. A persistent rise in the metal value of silver and base metal coins. 2. An inflationary effect on coins. 3. The difference between the metal value and face value in coins.

note that pre-1982 copper US penny worth about $0.02 in metal value

That's one problem with this Thomas Friedman guy - he (the bestselling author of The World Is Flat, which argues the advantages of globalization in the internet age) didn't seem to understand the very simple dynamics that globalization forces redundancy (slack) out of the system. And whenever you don't have redundancy, you have Extremistan. Things are way too efficient, so the smallest mistake blows up.

David Evans has 21 years of experience in merchant and investment banking, principal investing, and private equity, and has been directly responsible for over $1.5 billion in private equity investment transactions. In his leadership role with Glencoe Capital, Evans is also the Chairman of the firm's Investment Committee. Prior to co-founding Glencoe in 1993, Evans was a merchant banking and mergers and acquisitions specialist at Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette from 1985-87 and 1988-93. He also served as Associate Director of the University of Michigan's Growth Capital Foundation and as a principal of Handelsman & Co., a venture capital firm. Evans has also served as an expert witness for the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System with respect to certain of its alternative investments.

The Growth Capital Fund will make direct investments of $2 million to $7 million in venture capital and expanding companies, while the Michigan Opportunities Fund will make direct investments of $10 million to $40 million in potential acquisitions and buyouts.

A Business Leadership Council chaired by Penske Corp. Chief Executive Roger Penske will assist the fund managers. Penske, who appeared with Granholm at Thursday's announcement, said the council would review investment proposals, evaluate management and capital requirements and meet with entrepreneurs to discuss their companies' goals and strengths.

a pdf for menu planning for lunch - hm that might work as a dinner planning tool too

indymac taken over by fdic, will reopen monday - about 10000 people have > $100000k each in the bank and stand to lose some of the uninsured excess

The paper draws on historical trading methods and 19th and early 20th century references ignored by the finance literature. It is time to stop calling the formula by the wrong name.

revenue = (dumb money * CPM(dumb)) + (smart money * CPM(smart)).

Meebo raising money at a valuation that puts them at where JP Morgan is offering to buy Bear; advantage, less toxic debt; but Bear has a better building

Then there are guys like Ron Conway, Jeff Clavier, Aydin Sendkut, Georges Harik, Evan Williams, Narendra Rochelle, Marc Pincus, Reid Hoffman, and countless other investors who I admire

“Fluidity of the market” — “X” dollars, “contractual arrangements between institutions and counsel” — “X” dollars, “purchasing mortgages in bulk and securitizing” — “X” dollars, “rush to file, slow to record after judgment

Creditflux publishes news, comment, analysis and data on the global market for structured credit and credit derivatives

Mr. Kaplan came to Google after spending nearly four years at Economist.com, heading up their North American advertising sales operation. Prior to joining Economist.com, he worked for SFX Sports selling athlete endorsements and corporate sponsorships. He

1. Online ads will be less affected than other media / 2. Paid search will be less affected than display ads / 3. International will be less affected than U.S.

weakness in subprime mortgage industry impact on tech: blackberries less in demand because of woes in the finance sector (40% of RIM business)

Will the mortgage collapse blow a hole in bubble 2.0? We're becoming increasingly persuaded that it will. Why? Because financial advertisers account for more than a third of all web advertising, and as the plunging share prices of investment banks clearly

The former finance director for the Ann Arbor District Library again escaped a prison sentence Tuesday after turning over money he posted for a jail bond and agreeing to have his wages garnished.

In the 1990s, substantial growth in manufactured housing and loose credit standards for home-only loans led to aggressive lending practices. As a result, default rates and repossessions rose, underwriting standards tightened and credit offerings were curt

But when prime brokers turn off the funding tap, this virtuous circle may turn vicious. Hedge funds may be forced to sell their most liquid holdings since more complex positions may be impossible to offload. So a problem in one part of the financial syste

The financial instability interpretation of Keynes rests upon the profitability of debt financing, and incorporates the potential collapse of asset values in an environment of speculative and Ponzi financing. Consequently, the financial structure is signi

"American Home files for bankruptcy as talks fail"

Mr. Mackey’s post continued: “The views articulated by rahodeb sometimes represent what I actually believed and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes I simply played ‘devil’s advocate’ for the sheer fun of arguing. Anyone who knows me realizes that

wesabe opens up an api to your finances

Whether you’re a pure SaaS company or transitioning in that direction, SaaS Capital can help you bridge the gap created by the extended payment terms of the new model.

The authors show how organizations as diverse as the Boston Red Sox, Netflix, Amazon.com, Cemex, Capital One, Harrah's Entertainment, Procter & Gamble, and Best Buy are using new analytical tools to trump rivals. Through analytics, these enterprises ident

like walker tracker for your wallet

But the best way to play this is probably through live chickens. Own the inventory (chickens) for price appreciation while clipping the dividends (eggs) in the interim. It’s a no lose proposition.

Tuesday, June 12th, 7:00-8:30 PM, Burns Park Auditorium (1414 Wells St.)

Ann Arbor Parents for Schools, in cooperation with the Burns Park PTO, has scheduled a community meeting to discuss the current school budget crisis. Superintendent Todd Roberts w

aha, so this is what it does. could very easily use.

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, about the role of the improbable in our lives.

Now there's an exciting new service called Coin to Card™ that gives you free coin counting when you turn your coins into a Gift Card or eCertificate at participating Coinstar® Centers.

world map of economic activity

search through SEC filings in a new search engine

blackberry makers

united healthcare member site

prosper = microcredit for USA

UK only, so far as I can tell

more michigan forms and assessments rules

when the city messes up your property taxes, this is what you fill out to protest

malcolm gladwell on n. taleb and risk

more from N. Taleb on the random event

on the "Black Swan" unexpected and unpredictable rare event

an explanation in part why random events happen more than you expect

all for the worse, no more floaty checks