Sovestor's blog

Nassim Nicholas Taleb complains about bailout hazard on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show. Management of financial companies earned hundreds of million dollars while ignoring Black Swan risk.

Recent CBS 60 Minutes: New Wave Of Mortgage Rate Adjustments Could Force More Homeowners To Default. The video provides overview on the possibility of housing market and credit market to potentially get worse in 2009 and beyond. Further blows to the financial system could keep coming...maybe.

US Economy is clearly slowing down. Christmas season this year will not be as happy as last year: Real gross domestic product decreased at an annual rate of 0.5 percent in the third quarter of 2008, (that is, from the second quarter to the third quarter), according to final estimates released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis; Third-quarter corporate profits fell 1.2 percent, the fifth consecutive quarter of decline. Read more....

In this rare interview conducted by McKinsey & Company back in early 2008, Peter L. Bernstein, an expert on risk, explores the history of risk and how it works in real-world markets and in our lives.  He also explains why in the real world the most sophisticated mathematical models can sometimes fail. This interview is timeless and very relevant to current on-going global financial crisis.

Source: McKinsey & Company

Video Clip of Henry Paulson, Secretary of Treasury, on why he let Lehman Brothers fail. Our take: ... read more.

Paulson Talks Lehman from AlleyInsider on Vimeo.

An interesting business book to read: "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Galdwell. I found the book to be both entertaining and useful. Read more.

Here is list of hedge funds, banks, and investors that are exposed to the alleged $50 billion fraud by Bernard Madoff. Read more.

Here is complete list of financial institutions that have received capital injection from US Government as of 12/05/2008. Read more.

Breaking News: Obama Picks Physicist Steven Chu as Energy Secretary (December 10, 2008)
http://www.cnbc.com/id/28163600
Steven Chu (Chinese pinyin: Zhu Dìwén) is 1997 Nobel Prize in physics and is a former chairman of the physics department at Stanford University in California and head of the electronics research laboratory at Bell Labs. Steven Chu is perhaps the first Asian to hold such a high-level job in the US government. This is the right step for Obama to prove to the world that US is really a great country with a great heart that embraces diversity and democracy. Read more for detail.

General Motors' Restructuring Plan for Long-Term Viability submitted to Senate Banking Committee & House of Representatives Financial Services Committee on Dec 2, 2008: click here to download (PDF file; source: WSJ)