Bloomberg reports: Contracts on the Markit iTraxx Financial index of credit-default swaps linked to the senior debt of 25 banks and insurers were more expensive today than the Markit iTraxx Europe corporate index. That hasn't happened since Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. went bankrupt in September an...

Jeff Jarvis takes note of a very important development among some of the biggest and most successful news websites in the world: they're publishing APIs. The Guardian just announced that it is releasing all its content through an API as well as making available many different data sets through a dat...

There have been some scary figures about the destruction of global wealth being bandied about in the past couple of days. First the Asian Development Bank put out a report by Claudio Loser along with an associated press release headlined "Global Financial Market Losses Reach $50 Trillion, Says ...

Are you reading thousand-word stories about how Citigroup managed to propel the stock market upwards on Tuesday? Bear in mind this: Citigroup rose the grand total of 40 cents per share -- which means that its contribution to the 379-point rise in the Dow was a whopping 3 points. And at $1.45 a share...

The most emailed article on nytimes.com today is Dennis Overbye's piece on quants -- which has already resulted in something of a smackdown from Rick Bookstaber. I'm not a huge fan of the Overbye piece, and not only because his sidebar on David Li and the Gaussian copula function seems weirdly famil...

Well, that didn't take long. In November, BusinessWeek had a big cover story on the way in which dodgy subprime lenders were moving into the formerly safe-and-boring world of FHA loans. And now the shoe is dropping: In the past year alone, the number of borrowers who failed to make more than a singl...

One of the more annoying aspects of stock-market commentary is the idea that there is one ideal actual-value price for any given stock, and that the market price is either above that price, in which case the stock is overvalued, or below it, in which case the stock is undervalued. This is the kind o...

The Dow has plunged 3.4% to new 12-year lows -- the sort of event which, even a few months ago, would have engendered screaming headlines across the nation's newspapers. Today, however, we're getting headlines, even on the front page of Yahoo Finance, which look for all the world as though nothing i...

Amid all the debate about the cost to the government of a GM bankruptcy, no one seems to have stopped to ponder the mark-to-market cost to shareholders of unrelated companes. But today, with a GM bankruptcy looming, stocks in general, and financials in particular, are having another one of those day...

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