"Money & Investing" featured a world map showing countries seriously affected by the Dow's plunge - France, Germany, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Malaysia, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, Romania, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Brazil, Argentina, Canada. It really is a global economy.
The SEC is investigating whether some brokers are using different values for their own mortgage holdings and those of its customers as few of the firms reported big sub-prime losses as of June. Maybe they are managing well.
JC Flowers is in the news again. They are getting ready to pull out of the Sallie Mae deal, wherein Flowers offered a 47% premium to buy the company. He claims Congress is changing the rules of the game and thus he has the option to get out. If he does not win his point, he could have to pony up a $900,000,000 breakup fee.
And this quote from Ann Rutledge, a consultant, "No one really knows how to price asset-backed securities and CDOs and that's a real problem in the market now." I couldn't agree more. We have created securities that really make sense to only a few people in the world, but we have all these average Joe Finance guys who think that they understand everything financial.
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