Morning Reading – Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Bloomberg: Google Goes After Content Firms Again
Today Google quietly announced a new attempt to deal with its growing search problems. Recall, the company has been widely criticized for allowing sites to pump out content aimed at Google’s indexes, but most of it of low quality and only intended to drive advertising.
Dealbreaker: John Pauslon’s Friends Thought His Subprime Trade Was So Stupid They “Felt Sorry” For Him
Remember John Paulson’s big trade a few years ago? This subprime business something or other? It ended up pretty well for him, netting a bunch of billions and the respect of his peers but at the time, most people who JP told about it it had a good laugh at his expense and thought to themselves, “who is this fuckin’ guy,” Paulson recounts.
The Big Picture: Judge: MERS Invalid
“MERS and its partners made the decision to create and operate under a business model that was designed in large part to avoid the requirements of the traditional mortgage-recording process. The court does not accept the argument that because MERS may be involved with 50 percent of all residential mortgages in the country, that is reason enough for this court to turn a blind eye to the fact that this process does not comply with the law.”
-U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert E. Grossman
The Big Picture: Not Quite Overbought Yet, But . . .
As this graph from The Chart Store shows, the markets are not quite overbought yet.
The Big Picture: UltraShort Indices
I don’t understand why, but I keep seeing portfolios strewn with Ultra-Short inverse funds. These are the ETFs that bet 2X and even 3X that major indices will go down. 20, 30 even 40% of some accounts are laden with these.
Please stop.
JESSE’S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN: James Turk On Silver, and A Possible Twist of My Own
James Turk is extremely knowledgeable on the precious metals markets, and I always pay attention to what he says. He is sometimes a little more aggressive in his forecasts than I am, being of a more timid sort about dates and that sort of thing. He serves as a good counsel to me when I wish to test my own theories and knowledge of certain aspects of the metals markets, and am grateful to him as well as several others for this.
FT Alphaville: Dear Chancellor…
Time to get the quill out again, Governor.
FT Alphaville: Household deleveraging continues, sort of
From the FRBNY’s Q4 report on household debt and credit…
FT BeyondBRICs: Indian inflation: mixed signals
India’s latest inflation numbers weren’t quite the palliative its pressurised central bankers were hoping for. While headline inflation eased modestly to 8.23 per cent in January, food inflation – the component causing the most pain for India’s poor – accelerated to 15.7 per cent.