Word: borrowing
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...spot trouble brewing at the investment banks that fell under its purview. An SEC rule change in 2004 - which didn't generate a lot of attention at the time and passed before Cox came along - let the five largest investment banks significantly raise the amount of money they could borrow. In retrospect, the new ratio - $40 dollars borrowed for each dollar of capital to back it up - was precariously high, considering smaller broker-dealers were capped at a ratio of $12 borrowed for each dollar of capital...
...Obviously this is an internal division among Muslims. The case of Iraq is a particularly important one because Iraq is a country that has a Shi'ite majority but a Sunni domination. I would borrow a word from the Irish history to describe it and say it's the "Shi'ite Ascendancy." Since the days of the medieval Caliphate, the Sunnis remained the ruling group. They monopolized all of the positions of power and authority. Now, for the first time, the Shi'ite has access to power as they must inevitably in any real democracy, and so far its going...
...Here's how leverage works in reverse. When things go well, as they did until last year, Lehman is immensely profitable. If you borrow 35 times your capital and those investments rise only 1%, you've made 35% on your money. If, however, things move against you - as they did with Lehman - a 1% or 2% drop in the value of your assets puts your future in doubt. The firm increasingly relied on investments in derivatives to produce profits, in essence creating a financial arms race with competitors like Goldman Sachs. Even though the Fed had set up a special...
...action after the SEC sought to stop naked shorting with a do-not-mess-with" list of 18 financial institutions such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and investment banks. On July 15, the SEC issued an emergency order temporarily mandating that anyone who wants to short a stock "must borrow or arrange to borrow the security or otherwise have the security available to borrow in its inventory prior to effecting the short sale." As Cox explained in an op-ed, "Our emergency order is not a response to unbridled naked short selling in financial issues - so far, that...
Short sellers borrow stock and sell it, essentially betting that the price of their target company will fall before they have to replace the borrowed shares. They have been disparaged as vultures, rumor mongers, cheats and criminals. But they have not, by and large, been wrong in their choice of targets. Bear and Lehman died because they were undercapitalized. Merrill's own mismanagement helped to chase it into the arms of B of A. Yet in the case of AIG, the argument is that the company would have remained afloat had its stock price not been driven down, which triggered...