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Financial Reporting Transparency and Regulation

Andy Spero | March 30, 2009 | 0 Comment(s) |

There are two related essays in the editorial section of today’s (March 30) edition of The Wall Street Journal regarding government oversight and regulation that are worth mentioning: Welcome, Businessmen, to Government Oversight and Transparency Is More Powerful Than Regulation. We’ll mention the suffocating nature of regulations and then discuss the more interesting topic last, including our own work of using XML-based systems and tags for (internal) management information systems, which relates to the discussion of XBRL systems in the second column.

Suffocating Regulations and Bureaucracy

Is there any other… Read the rest

How to Trade CMBS?

Andy Spero | December 4, 2008 | 0 Comment(s) |

Our site’s statistics program keeps track of the search terms used to arrive at our humble little venue, and this morning we noticed a hit from the query, “How to trade CMBS?”

That, as they say, struck us kind of funny. 

We thought: given the ongoing and (we would guess) accelerating problems in commercial real-estate such a question could come from either (1) someone completely unfamiliar with Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities or (2) someone completely, deeply, and desperately immersed in the industry.  (As a last-ditch effort for marketing help.)

In that way, we’d imagine that… Read the rest

CMBS Is Like Lumpy MBS and That's Not Good

Andy Spero | November 19, 2008 | 1 Comment(s) |

We’ve discussed Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities or CMBS in a number of posts.  So, it’s worth mentioning that spreads on AAA CMBX (CDS) increased substantially on Tuesday.  At about 550 basis points, those spreads seem to be twice as high as the previous all-time high, which was reached in the late winter of this year, and are seven or eight times higher than on January 1.

It’s much harder to say where spreads on CMBS (bonds) are since they tend not to trade.  Historically, they didn’t trade much, and now… Read the rest

Principles Lost and More

Andy Spero | October 3, 2008 | 0 Comment(s) |

Or–to seriously mix our metaphors–falling head-over-heels for the wolves’ claims that the “sky is falling.”

Our favorite line from the play and movie, A Man for All Seasons, is Saint Thomas More’s statement at his trial in which he gently belittles one of his perjuring accusers, Richie Rich:

“Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world…Ahh, but for Wales?”

Mr. Rich received an appointment from Henry VIII in Wales for his efforts.

After performing a short and cursory search of the web, we’re… Read the rest

Moral Hazard and Another Problem with Illiquid Assets

Andy Spero | September 26, 2008 | 0 Comment(s) |

in a Mark-to-Market Accounting Regime.

Here’s a couple of related issues that we can discuss in the context of today’s The Wall Street Journal article, Bailout Proposal Gets Hung Up Over Central Issue: Will It Work?

We’re deeply concerned about the moral hazard implications of any government bailout, and we doubt that we are the only observer to harbor such dark thoughts.  However, we also think that those implications could be realized immediately rather than, say, during the “next” downturn in some far distant time.  Thus… Read the rest