The Sound of Many Band-Aids

The Sound of Many Band-Aids

We were going to give credit risk and commercial real estate a pass this week, but the news wouldn’t let us. Late Thursday our already troubled friend, New York Community Bancorp (NYCB), said it had discovered “material weaknesses” in how it tracks loan risk. The...
Not All Quant Quakes Are Black Swans

Not All Quant Quakes Are Black Swans

Information about the Chinese financial markets is often fleeting, sparse, and long after the fact. This week, however, Bloomberg brought a piece on a recent Quant Quake, a headline too good to pass up. The piece talks about how Chinese quant hedge funds—hedge funds...
Even Scalier Scales

Even Scalier Scales

There is a new paper out that explores the need for a new category of hurricanes to capture those that have winds beyond 192 mph—of which the world has measured five, all in the last decade. The authors of the paper (James Kossin and Michael Wehner) predict that if...

O as in Out-Of-Office

Yeah, well, there was a fear it might come, there were hints it might come, there were expert predictions it might come, there were small kids yelling: “It’s coming, it’s coming,” and this week it came: the office loan losses. It wasn’t a lot, but enough to evoke that...
What Goes Up, Must … What?

What Goes Up, Must … What?

Everyone knows that January is the time for sales. The market for government debt is no different. Come the new year, and countries around the world are looking to fund their budgets, which usually means that you can snag a good deal on treasury bonds. And in 2024 the...