July 1, 2009 at 1:30 am Media Appearance: MSNBC’s Morning Meeting
I will be appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Meeting with Dylan Ratigan on Wednesday, July 1 at 9:30 am.
Dylan’s a great interviewer, and it should be fun!
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Blog » Appearances
June 28, 2009 at 11:30 am Fix What’s Broken
Ignore the horrible caricature, and read this
Click for PDF:
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I did an extensive interview with Kate Welling this week:
Barry Ritholtz, author of the recently published, “Bailout Nation, How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy,”is not a man to mince words. For one thing, he doesn’t have time. Writing is a sideline to his day job as CEO and research director of FusionIQ, an online quantitative research firm and money manager, running about $100 million, long and short, mainly for high net worth individuals. Besides, as the proprietor of a popular financial blog, The Big Picture, he has been chronicling the foibles and follies of financial man for a number of years now and well, just doesn’t suffer fools. His readers know him for clear explorations of even the densest of topics and for honest vitriol when he comes across self-dealing and worse.
There is plenty of both clear prose and pungent language in “Bailout Nation,” as it explores, in gory detail, where we’ve gone wrong in finance and in society. Not to mention, who done it.
My time between its pages left little doubt that Barry, whose legal training at New York’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law focused on economics, anti-trust and corporate law, has more than a few ideas about what should be done.
So when the unveiling of the Obama Administration’s regulatory reform proposals left me asking, “Is that all there is?” I immediately put in a call to Barry.
I wasn’t disappointed. Listen in.
-KMW
PDF: ritholtz-06-09
June 27, 2009 at 10:34 am Book TV: Bailout Nation (Sunday June 28)
* Sunday, June 28th at 3pm (ET)
* Monday, June 29th at 2am (ET)
Set your TIVOs for Book TV
I actually thought the presentation went better in the B&N in NYC — crisper, better narrative, less detailed — but the clips I saw of this were fine . . .
June 26, 2009 at 10:07 am MartinKronicle Podcast
Barry Ritholtz Podcast Interview
MartinKronicle
http://martinkronicle.com/2009/06/26/barry-ritholtz/
Barry is a trader. He speaks like a trader. He’s flexible, affable, and no-nonsense. He speaks with 100% candor which is refreshing, and also shows IMHO that he has a lot of integrity.
Links to Barry’s sites:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
June 24, 2009 at 6:00 am Forbes: Q&A With Barry Ritholtz
Q&A With Barry Ritholtz
Business Visionaries
Michael Maiello
Forbes, 06.23.09, 6:00 PM ET
http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/23/ritholtz-bailout-tarp-opinions-business-visionaries-transcript.html
Forbes: Barry Ritholtz, thanks for joining us. Bailout Nation–the book’s wrong. They paid back the TARP money; it’s all over, right?
Ritholtz: Not exactly. You know, one of the things we talk about in the book is, you know, we looked at the TARP money and–as a lot of these bankers have said–they didn’t want the money; it was forced on them by Hank Paulson. And so we try and figure out why would you give money to 10 banks when seven or eight of them really said they didn’t want [it] and the last one kind of went along with it. And the only explanation that made any sense to us was the TARP was a giant ruse. It was a way to fool investors and taxpayers in order to get money to the bank that was really in trouble, which was Citigroup.
And the only thing I could figure out is, the Treasury secretary said, “Hey, you know ,if we say the biggest bank in the country is verging on insolvency and bankruptcy, it’s going to cause real problems, so let’s grease them with a couple billion dollars, and if we have to slosh another hundred around in order to get them to get the money without anyone knowing it–well, so what? Everybody will pay the money back.”
You called it financial slander of the rest of the industry.
Yeah, to some degree it really was.
So they didn’t want to point out that Citigroup was the weak link, so everyone had to be treated equally.
That’s right. Listen, the whole system is at risk, and therefore we have to do this. Any time there’s a bailout you always get that explanation. There’s systemic risk. And then every time afterwards, we find out, “oh, really there wasn’t a systemic risk.” If Lockheed would have gone belly-up in 1971, who cares the [Vietnam] War wasn’t on the shores of California. They were one player–they would have reorganized and come out of bankruptcy and been fine.
Same thing with Chrysler in 1980, the economy wouldn’t have collapsed. And I make the same argument that Bear Stearns, if really they were so systemic–and we do know they had $9 trillion worth of derivatives, of which almost half was exposed to JPMorgan. Well that was JPMorgan’s responsibility. Let them fix it. You don’t have to give them $29 billion from the Fed to clean up their own mistake. That’s just unconscious-able.
June 22, 2009 at 12:50 pm Tales From “Bailout Nation”
Barry Ritholtz, author of the new bestseller “Bailout Nation”, blames Alan Greenspan for America’s financial collapse and says troubled banks should be allowed to fail.
click for video
June 21, 2009 at 6:42 pm Appearance: NYC Barnes & Noble
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The request was made for a mid-town book reading, and it is now scheduled.
This Wednesday June 24, 2009 6:30 PM
Barnes & Noble
555 Fifth Avenue, New York
212-697-3048
Should be fun!
June 19, 2009 at 1:41 pm PBS: Nightly Business Report
click for video (story at ~5 minute mark)
SUSIE GHARIB: The economy sprouted more of those so-called green shoots today, a smaller than expected rise in weekly jobless benefit claims and a solid rise in May leading economic indicators. But despite the positive economic data, the U.S. remains mired in a recession which began in December of 2007. When will the downturn be over? Suzanne Pratt got some answers to that all-important question.
SUZANNE PRATT, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: Just as all bull markets eventually come to an end, so too do all recessions. The current downturn, arguably the worst since the great depression, is likely to be no different. Exactly when the recession will end is a bit of a debate on Wall Street. There is however far more agreement as to what the recovery will look like whenever it ultimately arrives. First the issue of timing. In the mainstream camp, many experts predict the economy will soon start expanding again.
MICHAEL MORAN, CHIEF ECONOMIST, DAIWA SECURITIES: When they get around to dating the end of the recession, I think it will probably be sometime in the late summer, early fall. If I had to pick one single month I would probably say September. But, I would stay open minded on that.
SAM STOVALL, CHIEF INVEST. STRATEGIST, STANDARD & POOR’S: Our view is the equity markets are foreshadowing an end to the recession by the September period and S&P economics is foreshadowing the same.
PRATT: And then there are the outliers. People like Barry Ritholtz, author of “Bailout Nation,” the popular blog “The Big Picture” and head of research at Fusion Analytics. He says it will be next year before we say, bye-bye recession.
BARRY RITHOLTZ, EQUITY RESEARCH DIR., FUSION ANALYTICS: My best guess is somewhere in the first half of 2010 and if we’re lucky the first quarter of 2010. But, it’s now the end of June. Are you telling me in July we’re going to be out of recession because that’s Q3 and I’m sorry, I don’t really see that.
