Doug Cornelius on compliance for private equity real estate
It depends. But it’s certainly not the scourge portrayed by the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. That bill is clearly myopic in equating private equity with leveraged buyouts. Even with that subset of private equity, the results of leveraged buyouts are not bad for the underlying companies. In a recent paper a group of economists … Read more »
Can I outsmart the economist Steven Landsburg? I tried getting the answers right in his new book: Can You Outsmart an Economist? The answer: No. I can’t. Mr Landsburg’s book present us with 100+ puzzles to illustrate some principles of economics. The puzzles bleed into understanding the interpretation of those principles in statistics, law, math, science … Read more »
I’ve said before that BitCoin is the Dutch Tulips of investments. The blockchain approach to recordkeeping is an interesting use of decentralized computed power for recordkeeping, but BitCoin units are less interesting. The main users are less than scrupulous users looking for ways to avoid things like anti-money laundering rules. Many bankers/traders see BitCoin as a way … Read more »
It seems like just a week ago that President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order requiring two regulations be repealed for every new one adopted. It was. And this week a lawsuit has been filed challenging that executive order. The lawsuit was filed by Public Citizen, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Communications Workers of … Read more »
Tesla Motors is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for failure to disclose that one if its car crashed while in self-driving mode. The question is whether whether Tesla should have disclosed the accident as a “material” event: a development a reasonable investor would consider important. That opens a bigger question about the … Read more »
Under the International Investment and Trade in Services Survey Act of 1977, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis in the Department of Commerce conducts a “benchmark survey” of U.S. direct investment abroad every five years. U.S.-based companies with ownership of “foreign affiliates” are required by law to participate in the survey by completing and submitting a … Read more »
The US Office of Financial Research recently released a report raising concerns that the largest asset managers could pose a threat to financial stability. That puts firms like BlackRock, Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management, Prudential Financial, AXA Investment Managers, MetLife, Invesco and UBS Global Asset Management in the cross-hairs of being considered “systemically important.” The … Read more »
While the New York Fed is increasingly tasked with regulating financial institutions, its bread and butter is economic analysis. A recent report debunks the theory that the stimulus spending lowered unemployment. James Orr, vice president in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group, and John Sporn, a senior analyst in the … Read more »
The Securities and Exchange Commission took the bold step of filing charges against Standard and Poor’s, one of the three giant rating agencies. Personally, I think the role of rating agencies in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis has been under-appreciated. Without the the top AAA rating they bestowed on securitized mortgage bonds, … Read more »
We still make lots of stuff in the United States. China is our closest competitor. The two countries are very close at the number 1 and number 2 positions of manufacturing output. In the past decade, manufacturing output in the US has risen by a third. What hasn’t risen is the number of jobs in … Read more »