$$$ Foreclosure is just your house saying “You’re Fired!”– Donald Trump [NewsGroper]
$$$ TIM Monthly Review: Beware The Ides Of March Or Learn To Short Sell! [TS]
$$$ World’s Best Performing Stock Market: Pakistan [Deal Journal]
Archive for April 1st, 2008
Not Enough Cock, Coke or Money: The Few Things That Didn’t Suck about CNBC’s Seth Tobias Special
By Bess LevinLet me tell you a little something about CNBC’s For the Love of Money: The Death of Seth Tobias– it was awesome. April Fool’s! The thing sucked. And I say that as the person probably most excited about it outside of the regulars at Cupid’s, who’ve gotten some great publicity out of this whole thing, and were having a special on lap dances all week to celebrate. I actually left a friend’s birthday party with the excuse that I had to get home to catch the next showing, having seemingly sacrificed far too much by being out at nine when it first aired. My people don’t really read DealBreaker and had never heard of this Seth Tobias of which I spoke, an ignorance I envy. (This is really a bizarre little world I’m not even a part of but am forced to write about M-F, isn’t it? And lately, terrifyingly, I’ve found myself in a sort of Stockholm Syndrome situation. Walking down the street the other day, someone was saying how random it is that all these Capital One branches seem to be popping up out of nowhere, and one of my non-reading friends, thinking I could shed some light was like, “Bess, what’s up with that?” and I was like, “Bitch, we do not write about retail.”) Anyway, Tobias—I told them, “Can’t explain, gotta go!” and hauled ass back to my apartment, thinking I was about to settle in for the greatest story of our time. Turned out to be the most disappointing.
‘Member our coverage of the Tobias case? The hour was basically that, but with a painful amount of publicity for CNBC (old clips of commentator Tobias on the air that had nothing to do with anything) spliced in. Don’t get me wrong—I loved our coverage and review it daily. But I expected more. I expected Tiger dancing in a thong. I expected Tobias dancing in a thong. I expected Haines dancing in a thong. I expected a Food Network-like showing of Andrew Ross Sorkin preparing the Ambien-laced pasta alla vodka that Tobias’s wife Filomena made for him the night he died. But none of it, FFS. Anyway, I don’t want to end this day on a negative, so herewith, I present to you, my bulleted list of reasons the special *didn’t* suck:
EDGAR quietly put up a bunch of RSS feeds recently. How about that for entertaining? Personally, I’ve been enjoying monitoring the “all filings” feed and filtering it for “13d.” Someone just put a bunch of for-pay services out of business. I love progress.
It’s lately come to our attention that the vast majority of our readers have problems. Issues. Things that need fixing. Some of them are occupational (“I just got fired from Bear and no one’ll take my calls!”), some sexual (“The only time I’m able to have sex with my girlfriend is when I’m thinking about Chuck Prince”), some moral (“I’ve been invited to a six-week long bridge tournament; I really want to go but my company’s in the shitter—what should I do?”). We want to help but can’t because I would give bad advice on purpose for yuks, and no one would ever go to Blarney for life guidance. Still, we can’t have you guys up and offing yourselves—it would be bad for ad sales and who would correct our spelling errors, you know? We’d have to get a copy editor or something. So we’re starting an advice column but we’re outsourcing the dispensing of advice. We searched long and hard for the perfect candidate for the job and after several rounds of interviews and five blind taste tests, we finally found our guy. He works at a pretty paranoid company so we can’t tell you who he is, but you’ll probably figure it out over time. For now, we’ll just call him “Steve in Stamford.” Herewith, our first question. It comes from reader “LV,” who’s currently employed at a bulge bracket bank on Park.
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Actor Liam Neeson,
and Actor Charlie Sheen?
Subprime genius and Paulson & Co. Maven John Paulson,
President of the French Republic Jacques Chirac, and
Austrian President Thomas Klestil?
Serenity and American Gothic actress Sarah Paulson,
Ashley Olsen,and Meet Joe Black and CSI actress Claire Forlani
A DealBreaker Quiz:
Match the figures:
1. $38.6 Trillion
2. $11.9 $ 9.65 Trillion
3. $13.7 Trillion
4. $ 7.1 Trillion
5. $ 2.7 Trillion
6. $ 0.5 Trillion
A. The surplus equity value of all residential housing in the United States
B. The defense budget of the United States
C. The United States Gross Domestic Product (2007)
D. The present value of unfunded social security obligations
E. The 75 year Medicare “Solvency Gap” (75 year present value of unfunded Medicare obligations)
F. Total outlays in the federal budget (2007)
No google-cheating. Answers in comments after the close.
It doesn’t take much of an observer to note that debt markets are all aflutter. Last Monday thrashed treasuries, one assumes on increased investor confidence, and woe to the option trader that was long puts on Lehman (for instance, it being up $5.50 at the moment) this week, betting that it was next in line for a crisis of confidence. “Damn you Paulson, damn you and your Treasury Securities Lending Facility,” one trader could be heard cursing today. Ironic, that, given that the TSLF seems to be experiencing softer demand now. Sour hopes that the ripo market might collapse on some less than careful investment banks have, it would seem, soured. A second trader was heard to berate the first with a “It’s not the TSLF, you ass, its the damn Primary Dealer Credit Facility that’s saving their bacon. Slap my ass and call me Linda. I’m going to have to cancel my trip to the Vanderbilt Spring Festival now.” True, the PDCF had something like $40 billion in outstanding, overnight loans last I checked. Not bad for a vehicle that was just invented.
Watching Bear Stearns trade at $10.80 is somewhat amusing. Almost as entertaining as a 330 point gain on the Dow.
In this environment, you have to love market inventions that allow you to make pure bets on volatility. Nay? (Or I suppose Lehman puts could just look that much cheaper right now).
- Use the Bloomberg command
NH BLG_DEALBREAKER <GO>
to access Dealbreaker
