A Hedge Fund’s Loss Rattles Nerves

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/business/19hedge.html?ref=business

>The scale of Amaranth’s losses — and how quickly they appear to have mounted — was the talk of Wall Street yesterday, as was speculation on how much the bet was leveraged, or made on borrowed money.

>Traders briefed on Amaranth’s problems, including one person who examined the fund’s books yesterday, said that the losses might be considerably larger than the firm estimated.

I have no clue what 'blog aggregators' are or do - but $3 billion of possibly borrowed money vanishing gets my attention.

>>"The industry lobbied for an amendment to the federal pension law that would make it easier for hedge funds to handle pension money without being held to the law's fiduciary standards. Such a provision was included in the pension measures signed into law by President Bush in August."

I knew that various special interest disasters undoubtedly lurked with the 907 (!!!) pages of the latest carving up of pensions but this takes the cake. It beggars the whole concept of 'irresponsible'.

I continue to harbor forebodings of disaster ahead with hedge funds and 'private equity' as the linchpins of the unraveling of an unprecidented global debt bubble debacle and legistlative insanity on this scale merely reinforces my sense of the impending 'Wily Coyote moment'.

doom laden enough for any doom junkie. Consider this:

>>The International Swaps and Derivatives Association, a trade group, reported this week that the outstanding nominal value of swaps and derivatives at the end of June was $283.2 trillion.

Compare that with the combined gross domestic product of the United States, the European Union, Canada, Japan and China, which is about $34 trillion. The total value of all homes in the United States is about the same amount.<<

What’s a Couple of Hundred Trillion When You’re Talking Derivatives?

By FLOYD NORRIS

Published: September 23, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/23/business/23charts.html

$283.3 TRILLION! All about shifting risk from defaults...and folks, defaults are looming everywhere you look.

Alarm bells started going off for me big time vis-a-vis the stock market bubble when I read that a mere 5% drop in the Dow would wipe out a year's worth of US industrial production. We were then 18 months from the meltdown.

That's peanuts (chicken feed?) compared to the risks in derivatives and swaps.

>>Alas, I happened to be there the same day as one Chuck Forrest

What miserable luck. My condolences.

But Chuck the destroyer remains my all time absolute favorite Jeopardy contestant. The one I'd truly hate to face.

I quit watching during the Ken Jennings run. Apart from being repelled by Alex T's smarmy fawning, I felt that, after Jennings' initial success, the producers, having just done away with the 5 game rule, were deliberately sending in some of the lamest opponents ever for the promotional value of having this guy keep winning.

I kept saying to myself: 'Ah, if only Chuck were there to put this piece of work in his place.' Last I heard though, Chuck is a Foreign Service Officer and just might have better things to do with his time. Had there been no 5 game rule at that point Chuck would probably have ended up owning King Features outright.

I loved seeing a 'real' champ take down Jennings in the TofC. But I have scarcely watched since.

When I finally caved and subscribed to NYTimes Select it wasn't for the Op-Ed columns, certainly not David Brooks or Maureen Dowd whom NYTimes would have to pay me to read, it was Ms. Morgenson and Mr. Nocera and Mr. Norris that I simply couldn't do without.

Really excellent reporting. Well reasoned and well written.

"9. There will be a suckers’ rally in the stock market as investors will wishfully delude themselves that the Fed will rescue them and prevent a recession"

Nouriel Roubini | Sep 21, 2006

Oh, goody, another Chinese cookbook I probably need to add to the three dozen or so I currently lug around (not counting another dozen survey 'Asian', half a dozen covering various SE Asian styles, and at least a dozen on Indian cuisine).

Is it still in print of should I start checking the out-of-print sites?

My own nominee for the equivilent of "Joy of Cooking' as an indroduction to the cuisine of China is Irene Koo's 'The Key to Chinese Cooking' for it's clear expositions on ingredients and technique augmented by lovely line drawings and a complete absense of 'foodie porn' photos. I currently have a battered, burnt and spattered copy, as tends to happen to well-used cookbooks propped open near sources of heat and hot oil, as well as a pristine copy for reference.

I snagged the last copy Powells.com had in stock. A bargain at $12.50 in decent condition.

There's a web site with a sampling of recipes, too.

There's a slender little volume, probably also out of print, which I think is truly essential to understanding the underpinning of Chinese cuisine: 'Chinese Gastronomy' - Hsiang Ju Lin & Tsuifeng Lin [ISBN 0-15-617095] my first soft cover edition is 1977, which gives you some indication how long my obsession with this most remarkable of all the world's cuisines has been in force. It's not strictly speaking a cook book but there are excellent recipes illustrationg the concepts discussed.

any mention of Philip Gould's incredible photography of the whole state and its various peoples?

It's just more the same NOLA-centic ethos so like that famous New Yorker cover which reduced the whole interior to a blank space between the Eart Coast and the West.

'Louisiana - A Land Apart' LSU Press is absolutely essential.

He's even in the Smithsonian for crying out loud.

We miss Enola's Restaurant - the original hole-in-the-wall in Washington as well as the later version off I-49 near the original site of Evangeline Downs racetrack, but I'm damned if I recall ever having a 'diet' meal at either, cher.

My favorite summation of Paul's restaurant in the VC was 'More rules than East Germany and only tourists would put up with it.'