Posts Tagged
‘Charlie Gasparino’
by ilene - January 19th, 2011 1:58 pm
Courtesy of Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker
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I’ve always been a fan of Charlie Gasparino’s, I like his hard-nosed, old school journalism style and generally have agreed with a lot of his opinions over the years. But his rant about Meredith Whitney’s municipal bond research is so far off the reservation, he may be in danger of losing his Indian name (Reports With Martinis).
Here’s Gasparino excoriating Whitney for being negative about the prospects for municipal fixed income investing in the Huffington Post:
And yet, as the municipal market is crashing on her prediction, with deals being pulled and slashed in size, with prices falling and taxpayers having to pay extra so cities and states can sell debt, Whitney is refusing to release the actual report that would tell us how she came to such a brash, and unprecedented prediction, on the grounds that her research is proprietary and for the use of the clients of her research firm only.
It’s about time Whitney came clean and released her report to the public so we can determine if it should be given so much credence; and if it shouldn’t, traders and investors can stop a possibly misguided prediction from causing further damage.
Hey Charlie, I don’t exactly agree with Whitney’s assertion that a Munigeddon is imminent, but she has the right to publish her research as publicly or as privately as she likes. I’ll also note that muni bonds are suffering from limited liquidity as the mutual funds that make up a large portion of their ownership are seeing week after week of redemption. Little Meredith Whitney may have a decent platform but she hardly moves hundreds of billions of dollars.
No, if anything, the blame here goes to the municipalities themselves for writing checks and making promises that their tax bases couldn’t cash. The townsfolk won’t get fooled again – they are at the school board meetings and the Town Halls, they know there isn’t any money there. Whitney’s call has simply been the most vocal expression of this general consensus.
Don’t kill the messenger.
Source:
Meredith Whitney Should Show Her Cards (Huffington Post)
Read Also:
Muni Misunderstandings (TRB)
Tags: Charlie Gasparino, cities, debt, investments, Meredith Whitney, muni bonds
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by ilene - July 16th, 2010 9:47 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Submitted by Charlie Gasparino
Lloyd Blankfein’s Days Are Numbered as Chairman of Goldman Sachs
It’s a testament to the odd world in which we live that when a Wall Street firm pays a $550 million fine by conceding negligence in how it dealt with clients, its stock surges, adding billions of dollars in market value for the firm’s shareholders.
But that’s what’s happening to Goldman Sachs, as it reached its long awaited settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over how it sold a basket of mortgage related debt to investors in 2007.
Back when the SEC brought the case, the conventional wisdom on Wall Street and the financial media was that Goldman didn’t have to settle — the case was weak and Goldman is, after all, Goldman.
As I wrote on these pages back then, Goldman would have to settle because: (a) the SEC dug up some real questionable activity; and (b) no Wall Street firm, not even one with the ties to government that Goldman possesses can go to war with its primary regulator.
Now that Goldman has indeed settled, the news is being spun, again mostly by the financial media, that the deal with the SEC was a victory for Goldman’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who survived the investigation largely unscathed, paying a measly $550 million to the government (equivalent to a few days trading gains at Goldman) and without having to give up any power, such as relinquishing his role as chairman of the board, as senior executives both inside Goldman and at competing firms believed would be part of any settlement.
Well, if history is any guide, Blankfein may not go tomorrow, or even next month, but sometime in 2011, Blankfein will at the very least no longer be chairman of Goldman, and may also be forced out of the firm altogether.
If you don’t believe me ask former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill. Like Blankfein, Weill (at least on paper) was a good CEO from an operational standpoint. Following the creation of Citigroup in 1998, shares of the big bank soared. The bank was what’s known as a Wall Street darling for its strong earnings and a surging stock price, and Weill was regarded as the King of Wall Street, having engineered the largest…
Tags: chairman, Charlie Gasparino, Citigroup CEO, Eliot Spitzer, Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, Sandy Weill, Wall Street
Posted in Immediately available to public, Phil's Favorites | 1 Comment »
by ilene - November 6th, 2009 1:00 am
Courtesy of Jesse’s Café Américain
RealClearMarkets has an interesting interview with Charlie Gasparino regarding his new book "The Sellout." There seems to be a consensus forming that something has gone seriously wrong with the US republic, and that the Obama administration is failing to address it, failing badly.
One has to wonder what it will take to give Washington a wakeup call. It seems that, when confronted by white collar crime, people lose all the perspective which they have when it comes to fighting crime and injustice. "It won’t work, it can’t be done, they will just come back and do it again."
Well, duh. If you make it worth their while, administer wristslap justice at worst, and let all the top dogs openly flout the law, of course they will be back. What the US needs is the reincarnation of Melvin Purvis with a minor in finance. I would put Eliot Spitzer in charge of the SEC with the right resources and let him rip through Wall Street like the wrath of God, and make the bankers howl.
But that probably won’t happen, because there is too much dirt, too many scandals on both sides of the aisle for this crew to administer its oath to uphold the Constitution.
Here is an excerpt from the interview:
"I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but if history is any guide, it has to happen again--the "it" being another financial crash. Of course, it won’t happen tomorrow or next week, or maybe not even two years from now. But when the memory of 2008 wears off, and mark my words it will wear off, excessive risk taking will be back in a form that evades all these alleged regulatory controls that have been established. Regulation can never cure the disease of excessive risk.
The only thing that can cure it is tough love--allowing firms to fail. That doesn’t mean I wanted the Fed and the Treasury to walk away last year. That would have meant Armageddon. But they should have walked away before that, when the systemic risk was smaller and the damage would have been limited. 1998 would have been a great place to start. Let Long Term Capital Management fail; let Lehman, and as I show in my book, possibly Merrill to fail,
…
Tags: Charlie Gasparino, Citi, Eliot Spitzer, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, SEC
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by ilene - September 15th, 2009 2:16 am
Courtesy of Lawrence Delevingne at Clusterstock
Whatever President Obama says today about financial reform, Charlie Gasparino says the U.S. government is sowing the seeds of another financial crisis — and it’s nothing new.
NY Post: But the biggest villain, in my view, is that ultimate enabler of Wall Street’s greed and stupidity — the federal government, in the form of the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department.
Throughout the last 30 years of market ups and downs, the feds have bailed out the financial system by cutting interest rates to excessively low levels or, when Long-Term Capital was about to explode, by orchestrating a bailout of a hedge fund that had spread its virus throughout the banking system.
Each time, the financial bureaucrats told us the bailout was necessary to prevent total financial calamity — and that Wall Street had finally learned its lesson and wouldn’t engage in the risky practices again.
Well, not quite. Here’s Gasparino’s solution:
Goldman, Morgan and the rest of the “banks” should either become hedge funds — with no backing from the federal government and taxpayer funds when they engage in risk — or start handing out debit cards and toasters and become real commercial banks by concentrating on signing people up for checking accounts, instead of trading esoteric bonds If we don’t impose such hard rules, expect a repeat of what happened last year. If history is any guide, that implosion will be bigger and more dangerous than ever before.
See Also:
Gasparino: Broken Nosed Face Of The Future Of Journalism
Why Do Banks Grow Too Big To Fail?
Is "Too Big To Fail" Overblown?
Tags: Charlie Gasparino, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, Goldman, Hedge Funds, Morgan, Treasury, U.S. Government, Wall Street
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site