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:

Dec 19, 2011

Unless you read the Straits Times (and my deepest sympathies if you do), Sunshine Empire might be the biggest ponzi scheme you’ve never heard of. Between 2003 and late 2007, the company took in more than $180 million from investors in return for “lifestyle packages” and cash rebates. Of the $180 million, $115 million was paid back to investors, $40 million was handed out to directors as “interest-free loans”, and the rest - $25 million - just… disappeared.

Nov 20, 2011

Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, gave a talk in Singapore last month - and he had some interesting things to say in the Q&A session about the country’s casino gambling policy. When asked by a member of the (mostly civil-servant-trainee) crowd what he thought of Singapore’s casino entry fee system, he pointed out one potentially major flaw - the $100-per-entry fee for Singaporean citizens might actually increase gambling losses, because if you pay $100 to get in, you’re going to want to feel like you’re getting value for money.