May 25, 2010
There's a lot of excitement about just-launched startup Betterment, but I'm very wary. At best, it's an example of "bad" financial innovation. At worst, it's a straight up scam. It goes to show that it doesn't take complexity and structured products to pull the wool over investors' eyes; all you need is a website and [...]
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April 30, 2009
It is a favorite chorus of the anti-CDS crowd that CDS can make it more difficult for a company to survive, since bidding up CDS prices can affect the firm's cost of borrowing. This is about a hair's width away from the oft-cited argument that "short selling is bad because it drives down stock prices," [...]
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