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Posted
Jul 02 2009, 12:09 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 Want a nine-hole golf course in New Jersey? Talk to General Motors (GMGMQ). The company will soon auction off its unwanted assets as it reinvents itself in bankruptcy court.
One of those assets is the Hyatt Hills Golf Complex, built on a site where a GM factory once made hard rubber steering wheels and door handles, Bloomberg reports. County residents pay $18 to play nine holes there. GM says it will sell "potentially valuable but peripheral" property it accumulated over 100 years. "Kind of like a big garage sale," said spokesman Tom Wilkinson. "You will see some really good real estate deals come out of this." And some not so good deals. Like the New York foundry that poisoned
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Posted
Jul 02 2009, 11:25 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Well isn't this interesting: An investor at the Securities and Exchange Commission told her bosses in 2004 that something funny was going on at Bernard Madoff's firm. One of those bosses would later marry Madoff's niece. And what do you know? The investigator was told to focus on other issues, according to The Washington Post. The investigator, Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, sent e-mails to a supervisor saying her review of Madoff's firm raised red flags. But sources tell the Post that the SEC was under pressure to look for fraud in the mutual fund industry, so Walker-Lightfoot had to end her Madoff investigation to focus on mutual funds. The revelation is just going to be more damaging for the SEC,
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Posted
Jul 01 2009, 10:42 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 Oh, we've heard plenty about the spectacular investing prowess of Harvard University. Well, guess what? Schools with smaller endowments are now outperforming the prestigious university by significant margins.
The biggest college endowments, with their complex investment strategies, aren't doing as well as smaller schools with far simpler approaches, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Endowments with less than $1 billion fared better by choosing fixed-income investments, and not the riskier plays like hedge funds, the Journal says.
"Their superior performance is a sharp reversal from most years, when elite colleges profited from investments like hedge funds, private equity and real estate to finish at the head of the class," the Journal writes.
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Posted
Jul 01 2009, 09:45 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 Baaaa! Investors are acting more like sheep than ever, and that spells doom for the markets, according to Bloomberg's Eric Martin and Michael Tsang.
Their recent article saying that cash is the best strategy right now has some folks buzzing this week. "Investors are moving in lockstep like never before, driving up stocks, commodities and emerging markets and risking a replay of last year, when they all plunged the most since World War II," they write.
Markets have started moving together in weird ways. The S&P 500 is moving in tandem with the price of crude oil, FT Alphaville says. Same with emerging markets, hedge funds and commodities. This scenario is throwing a curveball at investors. It's great when everything rises together, but there's a good chance everything will fall together, too. How can you diversify?
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Posted
Jun 30 2009, 11:50 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 Government negligence pretty much caused the current financial crisis, writes Joe Nocera of The New York Times. Does that mean we can sue the government for our losses? No, he says.
In other words, victims of Bernie Madoff's schemes need to just get over it and stop suing the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to uncover the fraud, Nocera writes. If the SEC were liable for anything here, then taxpayers would be the ones paying Madoff victims. "This is not 9/11," he adds.
It's a pretty tough column saying all kinds of things that Madoff's former clients don't want to hear right now. They are responsible for their own financial gullibility. When something sounds too good to be true -- like the returns Madoff promised investors -- it probably is.
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Posted
Jun 30 2009, 10:53 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 You didn't think the banking industry was just going to roll over and accept the credit-card reform bill, did you? Oh, no. They've been busy making a giant vacuum, and are attaching it to your wallet as we speak.
Credit-card issuers are raising their rates and fees for some borrowers. Bank of America (BAC) and Chase (JPM) are charging higher balance-transfer fees, according to USA Today. Chase is also making it easier to lob penalty interest rates at customers.
Capital One (COF) and Citigroup (C) are raising interest rates. And InfiBank's APR is reaching ridiculous heights -- the greater of either 16% or 12% plus the prime rate, according to USA Today.
But what about that reform bill signed by President Obama in May?
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Posted
Jun 30 2009, 09:49 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 You'd think the Amish would be fairly insulated from the economic recession. But that's not the case in northern Indiana, where about half of the working Amish had jobs "off the farm" in RV factories, according to USA Today.
RV sales have dropped off in the downturn, however, and layoffs have hit Amish families. One man who was laid off said he was making $40 an hour. So in the wake of job losses, some Amish are returning to their core values and a more self-reliant lifestyle.
"Nowhere in U.S. Amish history has a down economy affected the Amish so much," one professor told USA Today. "It's a pivotal time for them."
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Posted
Jun 29 2009, 11:39 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
The always-entertaining Matt Taibbi goes after Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone, laying much of the blame for the world's financial crisis at the feet of the investment bank.
"The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere -- high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts."
In the second sentence, Taibbi describes Goldman as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity."
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Posted
Jun 29 2009, 11:15 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 General Motors (GMGMQ) tried for months to sell its Hummer brand, but massive gas guzzlers aren't that attractive anymore. So imagine the company's relief when a Chinese firm said it wanted to buy Hummer, which is known as "Hon Ma," or Bold Horse, in China.
But now it looks like the Bold Horse is staying in the stable. The Chinese government will probably quash the bid because the Hummer conflicts with environmental conservation goals, according to The Associated Press.
It's unclear whether the interested company, Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Corp., can overcome the government opposition. The company is privately owned, the AP reports, so it isn't subject to the heavy regulations that state-owned firms are. But the government can still stop foreign acquisitions.
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Posted
Jun 29 2009, 09:56 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Bernard Madoff, the financier whose fraudulent schemes ruined lives and destroyed charities, is set to spend the rest of his life in prison. A judge sentenced Madoff to 150 years Monday -- the maximum sentence allowable for his crimes.
Prosecutors had asked for the maximum, while Madoff's attorneys wanted only 12 years. The judge, who described Madoff's scheme as "extraordinarily evil," clearly wanted to send a message while ensuring that the 71-year-old man will never taste freedom again.
Cheers and applause reportedly broke out in the courtroom after the sentence was announced -- a response that shows how badly people wanted Madoff to pay for his actions. Madoff apologized before the sentencing, saying he “will live with this pain, this torment, for the rest of my life.”
So one man who abused the system shuffles off to jail, and will probably be forgotten soon. I wonder if anything has changed as a result of his crimes or his sentence.
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