[  This is a personal non-profit online research library and is solely used by Scott Bryan Hill.  Some of the links on this page lead to outside resources and the presence of these links should not be taken as an endorsement.  ]

L. F. M. Library Topics

L.F.M. Accounting

L.F.M. Corporate Governance

L.F.M. Executive Pay

L.F.M. Financial Firms

L.F.M. Financial Planning

L.F.M. Fixed-Income

L.F.M. Government

L.F.M. Individuals

L.F.M. Insurance & L.F.M. Annuities

L.F.M. Macroeconomics

L.F.M. Market History

L.F.M. Money Management

L.F.M. Pensions

L.F.M. Real Assets

L.F.M. Seminar Research

L.F.M. Stock Options

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

( Symbol Guide )

 [ A ]

'Auction Rates' Clip Tech Firms' Profits, Rebecca Buckman, The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2008.  “Technology firms, which traditionally shunned debt and were thought to be relatively immune to a credit crunch, are seeing their earnings dented by holdings of auction-rate securities."  (Financial Firms (Credit History))

Auction-Rate Collapse Costs Taxpayers $1.65 Billion, Michael Quint and Darrell Preston, Bloomberg, May 16, 2008.  “In 2003, the Culinary Institute of America outgrew a former Jesuit seminary building on its Hyde Park, New York, campus. So it asked Edward Shapoff, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker on its finance committee, for advice on borrowing to pay for new housing and parking.”  (Financial Firms (Auction Rate Market))

Arcane Market Is Next to Face Big Credit Test, Gretchen Morgenson, The New York Times, February 17, 2008.  “Few Americans have heard of credit default swaps, arcane financial instruments invented by Wall Street about a decade ago. But if the economy keeps slowing, credit default swaps, like subprime mortgages, may become a household term.”  (Accounting:  Derivatives (Credit Default Swaps))  What Created This Monster?

 [ B ]

Back-Door Taxes Hit Americans with Public Financing in the Dark, Peter Robison, Pat Wechsler and Martin Z. Braun, Bloomberg, October 26, 2009.  “Salvatore Calvanese, the treasurer of Springfield, Massachusetts, for four years, had a ready defense for why he risked $14 million of taxpayer money on collateralized-debt obligations laden with subprime mortgages in 2007.  He didn’t know what he was buying, he says, and trusted the financial professionals who sold them and told him they were safe.”  (Financial Firms | Market History | Government)

 [ C ]

Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, George Reisman, James Books, 1990.  (1102 Pages PDF)

Changing Names with Style: Mutual Fund Name Changes and Their Effects on Fund Flows, Michael J. Cooper, Huseyin Gulen and Raghavendra Rau, University of Utah - David Eccles School of Business, Purdue University, Purdue University; Barclays Global Investors, July 2004.  “We investigate the effects of conditional name changes in the mutual fund industry. Specifically, we examine whether mutual funds change their names to take advantage of the current hot investment styles, and what effects these name changes have on the flows in and out of the funds, and to the funds' subsequent returns. We find that name changes tend to occur in waves; funds tend to change their names to be associated with the current high return style or to disassociate themselves from the current low return styles. The year before a fund changes its name to reflect a current hot style or moves away from a current cold style, the fund experiences an average excess outflow of approximately -5%. The year after the name change, these funds earn average cumulative excess flows of 30%, despite no increase in performance compared to their pre-name change performance. The increase in flows is similar across funds whose holdings match the style implied by their new name and those whose holdings do not, adding support to a growing body of literature suggesting that investors are irrationally influenced by cosmetic effects.”  (Behavior Finance)

Color-Blind Merrill in a Sea of Red Flags, Floyd Norris, The New York Times, May 16, 2008.  “Would you invest money — at a very low interest rate — to finance mortgage loans made to risky borrowers who put no money down? What if you knew the company that made most of the loans had gone bankrupt because so many of its loans had turned bad almost immediately?  Now, no one would do that. But it was just a year ago that Merrill Lynch was wrapping up a securitization that met just those criteria. The securities were snapped up by buyers like the Bond Fund of America, one of the largest mutual funds.”  (Financial Firms and Financial Planners)

 [ D ]

 [ E ]

18 Years in the Making, Ron Lieber, The New York Times, June 19, 2009.  “Want to pick up the tab at Harvard for a child born today? It will probably cost about half a million dollars come 2027.”  (Education Planning)

 [ F ]

Federal Pay Ahead of Private Industry, Dennis Cauchon, USA Today, March 8, 2010.  Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds.

Fundamentals of Commodity Futures Returns, Gary B. Gorton, University of Pennsylvania - Finance Department; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Fumio Hayashi, University of Tokyo; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), K. Geert Rouwenhorst, Yale School of Management, International Center for Finance, June 2007.  “Commodity futures risk premiums vary across commodities and over time depending on the level of physical inventories, as predicted by the Theory of Storage. Using a comprehensive dataset on 31 commodity futures and physical inventories between 1969 and 2006, we show that the convenience yield is a decreasing, non-linear relationship of inventories. Price measures, such as the futures basis, prior futures returns, and spot returns reflect the state of inventories and are informative about commodity futures risk premiums. The excess returns to Spot and Futures Momentum and Backwardation strategies stem in part from the selection of commodities when inventories are low. Positions of futures markets participants are correlated with prices and inventory signals, but we reject the Keynesian “hedging pressure” hypothesis that these positions are an important determinant of risk premiums.“ (Commodities)

 [ G ]

 [ H ]

 [ I ]

Instruments of the Money Market, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, 1993

It’s a Long, Cold, Cashless Siege, Gretchen Morgenson, The New York Times, April 13, 2007.  “Craig Joffe, an investor who owns a laser surgery business in Minneapolis, says that a couple of years ago he was looking for a safe place to put most of his life savings. So he said that on the advice of his broker, he invested 90 percent of his wealth in something he thought was just as conservative, reliable and liquid as cash: three auction-rate securities.”  (Financial Firms | Financial Planners (Auction Rate Securities))

 [ J ]

 [ K ]

 [ L ]

Legal Matters with Charles T. Munger (Q&A), Stanford Lawyers, Spring 2009.  “Charles T. Munger is a man of many interests, much like his hero Benjamin Franklin. Self taught in a range of disciplines, he’s a strong advocate for interdisciplinary education saying, “If I can do it, many people can.”  (Charles Munger | 2009)

Leveraged Losses: Lessons from the Mortgage Market Meltdown, David Greenlaw, Jan Hatzius, Anil K Kashyap, Hyun Song Shin, US Monetary Policy Forum Conference Draft Embargoed until 11AM EST February 29, 2008.  “This report discusses the implications of the recent financial market turmoil for central banks. We start by characterizing the disruptions in the financial markets and compare these dislocations to previous periods of financial stress. We close by exploring the feedback from credit availability to the broader economy and provide new evidence that contractions in financial institutions balance sheets’ cause a reduction in real GDP growth.   (Financial Firms and Financial Planners)

Long-Term Capital: It’s a Short-Term Memory, Roger Lowenstein, The New York Times, September 7, 2008.  “A financial firm borrows billions of dollars to make big bets on esoteric securities. Markets turn and the bets go sour. Overnight, the firm loses most of its money, and Wall Street suddenly shuns it. Fearing that its collapse could set off a full-scale market meltdown, the government intervenes and encourages private interests to bail it out.  The firm isn’t Bear Stearns — it was Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund based in Greenwich, Conn., and the rescue occurred 10 years ago this month.”  (Financial Firms and Uncertainty)

 [ M ]

Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, Jesus Huerta De Soto, Union Editorial, Madrid.  (Market History (906 Pages))

 [ N ]

 [ O ]

 [ P ]

Prescient Are Few, Mark Hulbert, The New York Times, July 13, 2008.  “How many mutual fund managers can consistently pick stocks that outperform the broad stock market averages — as opposed to just being lucky now and then?  Countless studies have addressed this question, and have concluded that very few managers have the ability to beat the market over the long term. Nevertheless, researchers have been unable to agree on how small that minority really is, and on whether it makes sense for investors to try to beat the market by buying shares of actively managed mutual funds.”  (Active vs. Passive (***)) Seminars  False Discoveries in Mutual Fund Performance: Measuring Luck in Estimated Alphas

Pseudo-Science Hurting Markets, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Financial Times, October 23 2007.  “Last August, The Wall Street Journal published a statement by one Matthew Rothman, financial economist, expressing his surprise that financial markets experienced a string of events that “would happen once in 10,000 years”. A portrait of Mr Rothman accompanying the article reveals that he is considerably younger than 10,000 years; it is therefore fair to assume he is not drawing his inference from his own empirical experience but from some theoretical model that produces the risk of rare events, or  what he perceives to be rare events.”   (Financial Firms and Financial Planners)

 [ Q ]

 [ R ]

Rankings for Fixed Income (Lehman Brothers 2008) (Financial Firms and Financial Planners)

Red Flags That Muni Investors Can’t See, Gretchen Morgenson, The New York Times, March 22, 2009.  “Hammered by turbulent stock prices, investors have retreated in recent months to the relative safety of good old municipal bonds. Trading in this $2.7 trillion market rose 22 percent in 2008.  Unfortunately, investor protection in this arena is so spotty that there is potential for much mischief.  Full disclosure, that bedrock of fair securities markets, is the heart of the problem facing municipal investors. Indeed, municipal issuers often fail to file the most basic reports outlining their operating results or material changes in their financial conditions.”  (Money Management (Municipal Bonds)

Retail Investors In US Equities Hits Low, Deborah Brewster, The Financial Times, September 1, 2008.  “Individual ownership of US stocks has fallen to a record low, underscoring the increasing importance of institutional investors in domestic equity markets, according to a report to be released today.  Retail investors owned 34 per cent of all shares and 24 per cent of stock in the top 1,000 companies at the end of 2006, the last year for which figures are available, said the Conference Board, an industry group. Both numbers are record lows.”  (Financial Firms and Financial Planners)

 [ S ]

Some Mutual Fund Numbers Look Great, but for Whom?, Harry Hurt III, The New York Times, April 20, 2008.  “The public stock markets are in the throes of one of the biggest and most egregious financial scandals in modern history, according to Louis Lowenstein. The scandal has little to do with highly publicized abuses like market timing or insider trading. It is not directly related to the current credit and subprime mortgage crises.  Instead, it involves the $10 trillion in life savings that 90 million individual investors in the United States have entrusted to mutual funds.”  (Financial Firms | Financial Planners (Auction Rate Securities))

Stock Boosters Still Rule the Street, Gene Epstein, Barrons, November 26, 2007.  “After the Dot-Com bubble popped, many Wall Street analysts were exposed as cheerleaders, willing at times to tout stocks they secretly disdained. And the subsequent billions of dollars in fines, tighter regulation and public embarrassment don't seem to have dampened their bullish views of the companies they track.”  (Financial Firms)

Subprime Lender's Failure Sparks Lawsuit Against Wall Street Banks, Steve Stecklow, The Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2008.  “Until a few weeks ago, Sonia Deravedisian had never heard of the subprime-mortgage market. Nevertheless, she lost her life savings because of it.”  (Financial Firms and Financial Planners)

 [ T ]

Tariff History of the United States Part I, F.W. Taussig, G.P Putnam's Son, 1892.  (Market History (271 Pages))

This Time is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises, Carmen M. Reinhart, University of Maryland and NBER & Kenneth S. Rogoff, Harvard University and NBE, March 5, 2008.  “This paper offers a “panoramic” analysis of the history of financial crises dating from England’s fourteenth century default to the current United States sub-prime financial crisis. Our study is based on a new dataset that spans all regions. It incorporates a number of important credit episodes seldom covered in the literature, including for example, defaults in India and China. As the first paper employing this data, our aim is to illustrate some of the broad insights that can be gleaned from such a sweeping historical database.  We find that serial default is a nearly universal phenomenon as countries struggle to transform themselves from emerging markets to advanced economies.”  (Financial Firms and Financial Planners)

Tricks of the Trade, Chris Hansen, MSNBC Online, April 13, 2007.  “A Dateline hidden camera investigation sees what insurance agents say -- and what they don't -- when they think they are alone with a senior.”  (Annuities)

 [ U ]

 [ V ]

 [ W ]

 [ X ]

 [ Y ]

 [ Z ]

Symbol Guide

Academic Study,  Bearish Case, Bullish Case, "Debate," Federal Reserve

Investment Mine, Magazine Article Newspaper Article, Online Site, Research Report

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