Jul 7, 2012

Walter Kurtz at Sober Look had a great piece a few weeks ago, where he wryly suggested a way to make money if you don’t like that IRS the bank’s sold you: default on the payments and sue the bank. (Note: this is not an actual way to make money, and also not a good idea if you don’t like angry traders hunting you down.) The “sue the bank” option has a long and storied history in corporate hedging circles.

May 1, 2012

Slightly old news (it’s from January) but this is, to put it politely, quite astonishing: when the SGX ordered listed company China Sky Chemical Fibre to appoint a special auditor to investigate its (probably fraudulent) accounts and (probably dodgy) related-party real estate transactions, China Sky turned around and told the SGX to shove its special auditor up its tailpipe. It says volumes, I think, that a dodgy Chinese midcap can defy the SGX’s market regulatory authority without any repercussions beyond a sternly worded (but weirdly petulant) letter from the exchange:

Apr 27, 2012

Since it was published on Tuesday, Vincent Cignarella’s article for WSJ MarketBeat - The Foreign Exchange Traders’ Lament, and kudos to the WSJ’s subs for the correctly placed apostrophe - has done the rounds of every spot FX desk on the street, and “cable is 1.60” has already become a catchphrase on a par with “don’t fight the Fed”. There’s a good reason for that: Cignarella’s piece nails the current sentiment in FX markets.

Apr 2, 2012

DBS Bank has just launched the largest ever banking M&A deal in south-east Asia, offering more than SGD 7 bio to buy Indonesia’s Bank Danamon (which is 67% owned by Temasek, the SWF that also owns a one-third stake in DBS). Two thoughts: 1) The hefty control premium - 50% above Bank Danamon’s pre-announcement price - means that DBS has effectively written a massive cheque to its own largest shareholder to get the deal done.

Jan 31, 2012

The country that gave us bubbles in equities, jade, paintings, shares in paintings, table salt, fermented tea, fake French wine, 19th-century stamps and silver is now inflating a bubble in - hold your nose - dead-caterpillar fungus. The price of a pound of the fungus (which grows in the brain of infected caterpillars and is reputed to have aphrodisiac properties) has doubled in two years, and exchanges have been opened to trade these new “investment products”, but it’s not a bubble, no sir: