Bronte Capital

The sometimes eccentric views of John Hempton

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

A Morphology of the Sin of Bad Lending

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Grace – it is said – refers to a Single State only – whereas Sin refers to a multitude.  Good Lending – like a State of Grace – is hard to m...
8 comments:
Saturday, February 6, 2010

Globalizing the Australian Intergenerational Report – thinking about long term sovereign solvency in Australia, the US, New Zealand, Japan and China

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In the financial crisis governments seemingly regularly guaranteed their banks to stop their banks from collapse. This worked in preventing ...
42 comments:
Friday, January 22, 2010

What is proprietary trading?

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Somewhere in the debate about prohibiting proprietary trading in certain banks we will need a decent understanding of what proprietary tradi...
22 comments:
Wednesday, January 20, 2010

The sweetest usurious bastards

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A long while ago I did some work on Rent-A-Center – a company in the difficult and arguably immoral business of “rent-to-buy”.  Rent-to-buy...
23 comments:
Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Market (and taxpayer) sensitive redaction

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Being a fund manager involves many skills.  One of the rarer ones is trying to work out what redacted government documents say.  The Departm...
16 comments:
Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Astarra: Don't blame the regulator

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Here is an article which blames the regulator for allowing Astarra to go on as long as it did. It is not the only such article. The article...
13 comments:
Saturday, January 2, 2010

A dark privatised social security story: Astarra, the missing money and how examining a fund manager owned by Joe Biden’s family led to substantial regulatory action in Australia

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In Mid September I wrote a letter to Australian regulators which detailed my concerns about a fund manager in Australia known as the Astarra...
28 comments:
Thursday, December 31, 2009

Keynes on British industrial history

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I will leave aside Felix Salmon calling me “socially useless” (as a short seller) until I am in a position to reveal my pithy reply.  For t...
5 comments:
Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Kodak, Bill Gates and efficient markets

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I am just back from my summer holidays on the New South Wales South Coast.  To my (mostly) Northern Hemisphere readers I should boast about ...
27 comments:
Thursday, December 10, 2009

When regulators can’t do math: gas pipeline edition

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The Federal Regulatory Energy Commission (the FERC) is charged – amongst other things – with regulating the rate of return on interstate nat...
17 comments:
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