Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

Fascinating visualization of US bank failures by the folks at Computational Legal Studies.

The interesting thing to note, of course, are the three key takeaways:

1. Acceleration: There were four failures in the first six months of 2008, followed by another 22 failures in the next six months. By January of 2009, there were 21 failures in the first three months of the year, followed by 138 from April to last Friday.
3. Magnitude: Failures in the past two years have cost the Depositors Insurance Fund an estimated $57B. The IndyMac failure of July 2008 accounted for $10B alone, followed by BankUnited at $4.9B and Guaranty Banks at $3B.
4. Spatial Correlation: There is a significant amount of spatial correlation in California, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Illinois. These states account for 77% of the total costs to the Depositors Insurance Fund. Furthermore, most of the losses in California and Georgia were concentrated highly around a few urban centers.

(Link du jour Paul Kedrosky)

Following Berkshire Hathaway’s SEC filing last Friday, I received the ballot to vote on the splitting of Berkshire Hathaway Class B stock.

To me, it is an unfortunate sign because this would effectively invite every option trader to speculate on Berkshire Hathaway — and BRK will move away from being one of the few remaining investment equities and go towards being a speculative equity (although, one may argue that all equities are by definition speculative).

Doing some rough math, the number of Class B shares would go up from ~47 million to potentially ~2.33+ billion.  And that would also raise the issuing maximum from the current 57.7 million to 3.23 billion.

Cheap options and easier buy = higher noise and higher volatility.

We should all rejoice, for it signifies the return of Gen Braham, the rather Unintelligent Speculator.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while now.

Some time ago, the WSJ had an excellent interactive graphic that chronicled the timeline of credit crisis by stacking the 6 key financial indicators through these two years.

The key indicators were DJIA, Treasury Yields, Libor, Commercial Paper Yields, CDS Spreads & Mortgage Backed-Securities Spreads.

Lately, everyone has been abuzz about the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer showdown.

I know lots of folks who know Cramer personally, and he’s supposed to a good, sharp guy, even if I do hate his show. On the other hand, I also like Jon Stewart and think he’s a funny, intelligent actor and that we need more of his kind out there.

But either way, I found the exchange between them to be rather sad and quite distasteful.

First of all, who does Jon think CNBC’s customers are? The regular joe or the guys on Wall Street? To answer that, look at who pays for most of the ads that are shown.  So, does it surprise people that CNBC targets Wall Street?

And secondly, while responsibility on CNBC’s part is certainly a laudable goal, let me play the devil’s advocate here for a minute.  Why should CNBC have any responsibility? At the end of the day, they are a TV channel. If SEC regulators and corrupt politicians did not foresee the economic problems of the day, we certainly cannot and should not expect a for-profit organization to. If anything, expecting them to do so is unfair and hypocritical.

Jon was being an ass to a guest who was doing a mea culpa. And worse yet, Jon didn’t care about Cramer. He just wanted to use him as a platform for for this entire thing.

Yes, it is wonderful to look back and blame people — but remember, at the end of the day, some of the smartest folks out there missed this coming. That’s the whole point of a bubble. But let me ask Jon this question. What about all those people who were said this was coming? Nassim Taleb, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Nouriel Roubini and a ton of others? Where was the daily show when these guys were talking about this? I did not see Taleb on the daily show in 2006. Oh wait, Jon was busy making fart noises and funny sounds.

But more importantly, Jon must realize one thing — if someone knew that this was all going to come down, it was more than likely that they were going to try and capitalize on this. You see, not everyone has jobs where they can get on prime time TV and make millions making fart noises. It’s just the way the cookie crumbles.