The defining character of bank results up until Wells Fargo was (a) rapidly improving credit and (b) declining revenue. When I state that bank credit in the US is clearly and unambiguously improving my email runs hot with people arguing that the banks...
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The local paper has reported that Ross Tarrant has closed the financial planning arm of his business. Ross Tarrant’s business survived the financial crisis – according to quotes attributed to him in the local paper – by taking undisclosed...
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By now it is obvious – the money in the Alpha Strategic Fund – now named the Astarra Strategic Fund – has been stolen. Who was the actual controller of this theft and who was “just following orders” has yet to be judicially determined – bu...
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Lets recap my arguments from the early parts of this series. In Part 2 of the series I showed that if the Greek sovereign defaults either (a) it leaves the Euro and forces all Greek companies to convert all cash assets and liabilities to Drachma ...
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I am thinking out loud here – and hope for comments. For our portfolio it has not been a happy few days. You will need to click for the tables. ============== With a due apology to the Vapors the new bear case for American banking was l...
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Bank of America has finally admitted that it understated the quarter end assets and liabilities for the years 2007 to 2009. It does not (yet) admit that similar transactions took place in many other years and it does not spell out the effect of t...
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I grew up in the latter part of the cold war and despite our modern day challenges we are far better off with the nuclear armed and ideology fueled terror that pervaded the post war era well behind us. But the cold war had its allure for an Australian...
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A correction to this post re the Australian infrastructure projects is at the end...The Confidence Game – the book about Bill Ackman’s pursuit of MBIA is a good book – but this post is not a review – rather a commentary ex-post on the whole bo...
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David Morisset is the nom-de-plume of David Andrews – a former director of Astarra Capital – later Trio Capital – the responsible entity for the Astarra funds. The Morisset persona is a self-published poet and a worthwhile writer. H...
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Sonray Capital failed a couple of days ago and the clients are likely to incur nasty losses. Strangely I first found out about this from US news sources. Only three weeks ago I wrote a letter to a blog reader who knew someone who worked at ...
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