Influx Insights Tag Feed: money

if you want to understand the financial crisis...

Influx Insights — 2009-05-21T12:54:56Z

If you want to understand why we are in the mess we are in, you can do worse than read or listen to Gillian Tett.

Gillian studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge and then went into journalism with the Financial Times. Most books on finance are pretty dull affairs, but her book Fool's Gold, which tells the story of the derrivatives team at J.P. Morgan reads like a thriller.

You can get a sampling of her intellect and storytelling abilities by listening to a lecture she gave recently at the London School of Economics.

Posted by Ed Cotton

vanishing money

Influx Insights — 2009-01-21T11:08:08Z

Nice visual from JP Morgan on current market caps for banks around the world.

Via Paul Kedrosky

Posted by Ed Cotton

hedge funds explained on a whiteboard

Influx Insights — 2008-12-22T09:23:15Z

American Public Media 's Marketplace does a nice job of explaining Hedge Funds.

A look inside hedge funds from Marketplace on Vimeo.

Posted by Ed Cotton

top gear's clarkson on investing

Influx Insights — 2008-10-09T20:15:48Z

Top Gear presenter, Jeremy Clarkson- a wealth man made rich by celebrity vents his frustration at the banking system and the current crisis.

"As I sat there on that horrible Monday, watching the whole financial world on the brink of collapse, I thought back to all the midnight oil I’d burnt writing these columns, all the crappy hotels I’d stayed in while making various television shows. And how all of that revenue would be lost for a raft of reasons I simply didn’t understand.

Of course I made strenuous efforts to get my money out of AIG as soon as the scale of its problems became apparent. But it wasn’t possible. It had shut the fund in which I’d invested and it would remain closed for three months while it tried to sell the assets. “We need to do this in an orderly fashion,” said the man on the phone, calmly.

Inwardly I was screaming. I don’t give a shit about an orderly fashion, any more than a man in the trenches wants to look smart while running for his life. It’s my money. I gave it to you. You’ve squandered it on a Mexican’s house in San Diego and a stupid football team and that’s your problem. Not mine.

It turned out, however, that I was wrong. It was my problem, so I decided to try to understand banking. And what I’ve gleaned from a two-week crash course is that it is completely unfathomable. There isn’t a single person in the entire world who has the first idea how the system works."

Posted by Ed Cotton

the return of focus

Influx Insights — 2008-10-01T12:47:47Z

Cantos has a really good discussion on its site where it explores the implications of the credit crunch on the corporate sector.

The participants include: Robin Bew from the Economist Intelligence Unit, Davide Sola from the (ESCP-EAP) European School of Management, and Paul Anning from Osborne Clarke. It's a long and worthwhile read and contains this interesting quote from Davide Sola.

"If we look at a few numbers, if we look at in the States at the overall level of indebtedness, there was an interesting article from Martin Wolf a few days ago. In the 80s it was about 130% of GDP of the US, now it's 350%. Where does it come that from? The financial sector, number one. Five times it moved from 20 to 130, and also from 50 to 100. Which means that the business sector, they always used that. And banks usually were predicating and saying: "You need to have a certain capital structure, you need to have certain capital requirements if you want me to give you some debt." But then if you look at the bank Lehman Brothers went bust on 31x the capital structure they had.

So, you are predicating to your client that they should have a good capital structure but you're doing exactly the opposite. So I think that this correction is going to allow the people to return and say: "I am an industrialist, I am a service company, I should concentrate on what I do in order to cut cost. And I am a bank, I need to start to be a banker again rather than a financial engineer."

Posted by Ed Cotton

the social network meets the bank

Influx Insights — 2008-03-07T12:52:33Z

This is a really nice idea.

Smarty Pig is a site that helps people save for specific goals and allows friends and family to contribute to those savings plans.

Traditional banks should look at this because the 2.0 companies are snapping at their heels with innovations like this.

Thanks to Colin

Posted by Ed Cotton

thrasher- an investment fund for xers

Influx Insights — 2007-11-10T15:32:23Z

Brands in the world of financial investing are a pretty conservative bunch, fond of their logos intelligently crafted from the safe and trustworthy blue and green Pantone hues and communication targeted with laser-like focus on the Baby Boomer crowd. When we see their print and television advertising, it's mostly comprises images of smiling silver hairs walking hand-in-hand happily in the mountains.

However, all of the brands in the market understand that the next big opportunity lies with Gen X, but they are taking time to craft their strategies, making sure they get them right and the image doesn't conflict with that of the parent brand.

These are ideal conditions for the emergence of an upstart, in the form of the perfectly named Thrasher, not a skate magazine, a grunge band, but a mutual fund.

A fund focused single-mindedly on the cool Xers, yep the same ones, who were singing along to Beck's Loser and were never supposed to confirm to the ideals of the Baby-Boomers.

Thrasher appears to know these people, what they look like, what they want to hear, but more than that, they know what they want in cool brands. Thrasher's fund let's Xers invest in the brands they love and spend most of your money on; H&M, Louis Vuitton, Nike, Microsoft?, Bank of America, American Apparel, Chevron?,etc. It remains to be see if Thrasher's bold entry forces the hand of the establishment players to throw their hats into the ring and launch their own Xtreme funds.

Via American Madness

Posted by Ed Cotton