ForGave Collections

THE DAILY RECKONING - 26/03/2008 Yesterday, markets in Europe were closed. But in America, they kept doing what they are supposed to do - separating fools from their money. What is really remarkable - and entertaining - is that some of the biggest fools are the very same people who claimed to be Masters of the Universe, the hustlers who work for the financial industry. That is to say, the separators are being separated from their money too. And the more you look into it, the more you discover that they are not masters of the universe at all - but slaves to it; nothing but clowns in the great human circus…just like us. Last week, Bear Stearns' shareholders were separated from a lot of money; in a panic, they agreed to sell out for $2 a share. We wondered how these accountants, lawyers and market-savvy traders could have been so wrong about what they had. When the market closed on Friday they still had billions. When it opened again on Monday, they had almost nothing. How could it be...

By zhiliangh Let us remember today. The Bear Stearns Companies, Inc. (NYSE: BSC) is the parent company of Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc., which is one of the largest global investment banks and securities trading and brokerage firms in the world. The firm's main businesses include capital markets (equities and fixed income), investment banking, wealth management, and global clearing services (prime brokerage). The company was founded in 1923 by Joseph Bear, Robert Stearns, and Harold Mayer as an equity trading house. It serves corporations, institutions, governments ,and individuals. The company's business includes corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, institutional equities and fixed income sales, trading and research, private client services, derivatives, foreign exchange and futures sales and trading, asset management and custody services. Through Bear Stearns Securities Corp., it offers global clearing services to broker dealers, prime broker clients and other professi...

THE DAILY RECKONING - 13/03/2008 How to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs? "Steer clear of the new gold rush," urges Jason Zweig, a senior columnist at Money Magazine. "Don't give in," says Janice Revell, another senior hack at CNN's glossy monthly. "Step out of the stock market, even temporarily, and you may miss the whole point of owning stocks." "Aw, just lend! Lend! LEND!" screams the Federal Reserve. Sporting its usual crystal-meth grimace, it's stumping up $200 billion in Treasury bills for desperate New York brokers to kick-start the world's capital markets. And now they can use flakey mortgage-backed bonds as collateral. Stepping in "to address liquidity pressures" like this – and getting your chums at all the other top central banks to do the same – looks the next-best thing to buying mortgage-backed bonds altogether. But while central banks don't surely want to become "home buyer of l...

FN ARENA NEWS - 13/03/2008 President George Bush provided a rare television interview on US television last night. We can only surmise as to why such interviews are rare. On the question of whether the US was in a recession Mr Bush answered in the negative, while admitting that times were nevertheless tough. Said Bush: "[The US is not recession] because there's a definition for the R-word, and we haven't reached the definition." Comforting indeed. What Bush is referring to is the fact the long held economists' official definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth. The fourth quater US GDP growth figure came in at an annualised +0.6%, which means both the first and second quarters would have to be negative before a recession can be officially declared. As it then takes a while to compile the GDP numbers, it would be August before the truth could be known. The first quarter numbers would provide a clue if they are, indeed, negative, but s...