Bailed-out insurer AIG again found itself in the crosshairs of bonus rage on Friday over its plans to pay $2.4 million in executive bonuses next week.
But the larger issue is how AIG will deal with its obligation to pay roughly $235 million still owed to employees of its crippled financial products division.
Déjà vu? A very nasty ghost in the machine? How about diversion instead?
Zerohedge has been covering the Sergey Aleynikov story and some very strange details are emerging. It seems there is some proprietary code for high frequency trading which is amazingly profitable, as in too profitable.
In a commentary Thursday Iati offers some thoughts about how important algorithmic trading has become to the market. His conclusion hints at the significant power of the programmers.
Some Green Shoots supporters have declared that the bottom is in. They point towards various short-term trends, and if you don't look too close, it appears to support their cause.
The Green Shoots supporters accuse the Brown Weeds advocates of using charts that are too long, and thus miss the recent movements.
Therefore I've decided to dig up my own charts, looking at just the last month.
Citigroup Inc announced its biggest management shake-up since the financial crisis began, replacing its chief financial officer and installing a new banking chief as it prepares to give the government a 34 percent equity stake.
What about the CEO? Vikram Pandit is still there and calling the shots. Citigroup owes its existence to taxpayers.
Morgan Stanley plans to repackage a downgraded collateralized debt obligation backed by leveraged loans into new securities with AAA ratings in the first transaction of its kind, said two people familiar with the sale.
Matt Taibbi has been wading through the objections to his Rolling Stone article a few weeks ago detailing how Goldman Sachs has profited obscenely by using its political influence to help create, then prick, a series of financial bubbles over the past century. Taibbi's reply is very much worth reading, to see the depths to which defenders of the financial status quo will stoop, such as hurling the "anti-semitic" charge. But, here is the conclusion, which I consider the best part:
In stunning news, the BLS reported this morning that weekly jobless claims fell 50,000 to 565,000.
At their peak in April, weekly jobless claims were 659,000. This is almost 100,000 less claims than then. Note that in previous years the July 4 holiday has not affected these seasonally adjusted numbers, so appears not to be an issue.
Considering Pimco was an originator of the idea of PPIP and it was well documented the massive fees PPIP would generate, the news Pimco pulled out of PPIP is surprising.
The U.S. plan to help buy as much as $40 billion in assets from banks got started almost four months after it was proposed and without Pacific Investment Management Co., the world’s biggest bond manager and an early supporter.
The U.S. Treasury Department picked nine money managers yesterday for the Public-Private Investment Program, or PPIP, including BlackRock Inc. and Invesco Ltd. Pimco, which in March announced plans to apply, said it withdrew its application in June because of “uncertainties” about the plan’s design.
Ralph Gomory explains comparative advantage once again and also calls cash on the latest nonsense in trade policy suggestions from the Financial Times claiming Japan should abandon manufacturing and is the cause of Japan's financial malaise.
Ignored in all these discussions is the obvious fact that when you don't make for yourself the things you need, you will have to trade for them. If you have to import cars and all sorts of manufactured goods, you will be importing on a large scale; to trade for them you will need to create additional goods or services that you can export on an equally large scale.
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