Browse by Tags

The Room

Blog Subscription Form

  • Email Notifications
    Go

Have You Seen This?

Have You Seen This?

  • The Room - 09/26/2008

    What a world I have returned to from my cloistered retreat at the beautiful Vivenda Miranda, scenically situated on a cliff outside of the quaint port town of Lagos, Portugal. Everything has changed. Everything is changing. The storm we have so long tried to help you prepare for is upon us. At this point, I can only hope you have your sails rigged for the storm now breaking, because time is running out. The violent volatility I warned of when last I wrote has arrived, with towering waves now rising up and smashing into the economy - and as an unavoidable consequence, our personal portfolios -- from all sides. Overnight the holders of my mortgage, WaMu, failed, the largest bank failure in history. This week, the golf course that I usually play on was taken over by the government... last week it belonged to AIG. As you don't need me to tell you, that same government now wants to spend over a trillion dollars to bail out Wall Street and to shore up the money market mutual funds - which have so far flown under the radar screen despite portfolios stuffed to the brim with bad paper. While no one was paying attention, U.S. automakers used their election year leverage to win approval for $25 billion in low-interest loans....
  • The Room 09/19/2008

    Hi, I am Olivier Garret, this week’s editor of The Room. What a rough week out there. My mind wanders as I drive at a crawl (I am not known to be a patient driver) behind a car full of “leaf peepers,” as Vermonters affectionately call the tourists who invade our state every autumn. I wonder how my friend David Galland is doing in Portugal, sipping the local wines with no access to his emails? It may be the worst week to be without market news -- or perhaps not… Hopefully David is enjoying himself while celebrating an old friend’s birthday with a group of other newsletter editors and industry peers. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chairman Bernanke are not exactly having a day at the beach as they try to solve our nation’s problems. By the way, this past week, it seemed to me that Lehman drew the wrong lottery number while AIG appears to have hit the jackpot. I wonder how many other “private enterprises” will be lucky enough to get bailed out at taxpayers’ expense in the next few months: WaMu, Wachovia, and hundreds of other financial institutions, GM, Ford, Delta, United?...