Paul Brodsky & Lee Quaintance run QB Partners, a private macro-oriented investment fund based in New York. This month we identify the nexus of the current economic problems and propose a solution to fix them. We discuss why we think our proposal would work, why some policy makers probably alread...

“Close them down, get them out of business. If they’re dead, they ought to be buried.” -Richard C. Shelby, the senior Republican on the Banking Committee, on ABC’s “This Week” > Thus, the strangely inverted world of bank bailouts continues. Republicans who started the entire l...

Words from the (investment) wise for the week that was (March 2 – 8, 2009) “Down, down, deeper and down”. So goes the chorus of a Status Quo song, but it is eerily starting to sound like the stock markets’ anthem. Another week and another plunge of equities on fears about the int...

Yesterday, in Backdoor Bailouts for Goldman Sachs?, we noted that GS, as well as Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Bank, were all made whole on their bad bets with AIG. That’s right, what was misleadingly described as systemic risk turned out to be in large part little more than a co...

My recent tirade against bailing out the hedge fund half of AIG makes much more sense when you consider who is actually getting all of the taxpayer largesse: Counter-parties of AIG, especially one Goldman Sachs. Some estimates have been in excess of $25 billion to GS. As AIG ran into the arms of the...

Some nice chart porn from CNN Money: > > Source: Unemployment hits 25-year high Chris Isidore, Jobless rate hits 8.1% in February as a record-high 12.5 million people are unemployed. CNNMoney.com senior writer March 6, 2009: 9:01 AM ET http://money.cnn.com/2009/03/06/news/economy/jobs_february...

You know its been a wild week when the monthly NFP is almost an afterthought to the action. According to Barron’s, consensus for Nonfarm Payrolls M/M change is a loss of -648,000; the range of estimates was -800,000 to -500,000 On Unemployment Rate, the consensus is a bump to 7.9%, and a range...

Yesterday morning, we posted the vicious — and amusing — Daily Show takedown of CNBC. It was a brutal, nasty but truthful piece, and I mused that “I would love to be a fly on the wall in whatever PR meeting takes place about this today…” Well, someone over there is on the b...

Following Rick Santelli’s Rant Heard Round the World, he was booked on TDS with Jon Stewart. There was apparently a last minute cancellation, and now, there seems to be a very nasty pissing match between CNBC andThe Daily Show. Didn’t the John McCain/Letterman snafu teach people anything...

I do think the financial press has contributed to the current crisis. The media, collectively, should hang its head in shame. Yes, some of us spotted some elements of what was going on: At the FT, for example, my little team started wading through alphabet soup back in 2005, warning of the dangers o...