Margin of Safety

author

Vincent Ryan

Finance and tech journalist for more than 30 years

Latest Posts

Category: Financial crisis

  • Next financial crisis locales? Try China and India

    As I wrote on CFO.com on Tuesday, China’s domestic banks may face problems during the “great moderation” of China’s economic growth.  A recent S&P report said that the majority of China’s top banks, and many regional and national banks, “remain vulnerable to credit shocks stemming from a hard-landing scenario for the Chinese economy.” They are not…

  • Anchor Comes Loose

    What a week for Anchor Bancorp of Wisconsin. Its holding company declares bankruptcy, then the SEC comes out today with fraud charges against the CFO. (The case was settled.) A bad earnings report just added icing to the cake. Anchor owed the Treasury $139 million in TARP debt. Like Anchor’s other creditors, Treasury settled for…

  • Guess who created the latest derivative product

    Yep, you guessed it, the federal government. The Financial Times reported today that Freddie Mac will sell a new kind of derivative that will get private investors to take on the risk of default of $22.5 billion in mortgages. From the story: Freddie is selling a new financial product it calls structured agency credit risk,…

  • Another kind of contagion

    Prior to the financial crisis, you may recall, most of the risk management talk in the banking industry was about protecting against a bird flu virus pandemic. While the mortgage-backed securities market was turning into a toxic wasteland, global regulatory agencies were more concerned about whether banks could function if everyone called in sick. This…

  • Buffett explains how to play it safe

    The Seeking Wisdom blog on WordPress had a great post about the concept of margin of safety. Read it here. Among other points, he provides an excerpt of a 1984 speech on buying companies, by none other than Warren Buffett (boldface is Vembunarayanan’s). You also have to have the knowledge to enable you to make a…

  • Bank execs have a laugh at our expense

    Listening to two Anglo Irish Bank execs joke about a 7 billion euro bailout is nauseating, but are we really surprised conversations like this went on? This recording of an internal phone conversation between the head of the bank’s capital markets area and its director of retail banking was uncovered by The Irish Independent. The…