German lawmaker lodges complaint with top court against ECB

Sunday, September 9, 2012

German lawmaker lodges complaint with top court against ECB

Chancelor of the Federal Republic of Germany Dr. Angela Merkel signing autographs on the open door day at the Bundeskanzleramt in Berlin, Germany Français : Dr Angela Merkel, chancelière de la République Fédérale d'Allemagne, signe des autographes lors de la journée portes ouvertes de la Bundeskanzleramt à Berlin, en Allemagne. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

German lawmaker lodges complaint with top court against ECB bond plan. BERLIN (Reuters) - A lawmaker from Angela Merkel's conservatives has lodged a complaint with Germany's top court over the ECB's bond-buying program, saying this could mean the court has to postpone its ruling on the euro zone's bailout fund planned for Wednesday.

Germany's constitutional court is set to rule on a temporary injunction request against the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and the fiscal compact for budget discipline in Europe.

Peter Gauweiler, one of the critics who filed a complaint with the court against the ESM immediately after the parliamentary vote on it, said in a statement on Sunday that the fund should not be ratified until the ECB rowed back on its plans unveiled on Thursday for potentially unlimited purchases of sovereign bonds.

"The ESM - as long as it is constitutional at all - should only be able to enter into power when the ECB has taken back its self authorization to become a hyper rescue fund," Gauweiler said in a statement.

"This possibly calls into question the plans for the announcement of the ruling on the ESM this coming Wednesday."

ECB President Mario Draghi unveiled plans last Thursday for potentially unlimited purchases of bonds of up to three years maturity from countries that request a European bailout and fulfill strict policy conditions. The German central bank chief was the sole dissenting voice in the decision.

A small but vocal eurosceptic minority of Merkel's centre-right MPs last week accused the ECB of writing a "blank cheque" to indebted euro zone states, and some threatened legal action to stop the purchases.

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Benjamin Graham Was A Crappy Hedge Fund Manager

Jack Bogle, the outspoken godfather of index funds and passive investing strategies, didn't approve of a recent Wall Street Journal article defending hedge funds.

In particular, he took issue with the author's reference to Benjamin Graham, the legendary Columbia finance professor who literally wrote the book on Security Analysis and mentored Warren Buffett.

Bogle wrote a letter to the editor. Here's an excerpt: Citing Benjamin Graham as the first "hedged fund" operator is an especially unfortunate example. "The trick," Mr. Rice writes, was Graham's "clever way to make money . . . whether it [the market] continued to rise, or started to fall." ...

Proposal for New Hedge Fund Fee Structure: 1% + 33% of Alpha

By The Big Picture

One of my pet peeves is the way that insiders -- whether corporate CEOs, hedge fund managers, or elected politicos -- capture compensation (or credit) for normal cyclical gains they had little or nothing to do with.

This is the approach favored by the Crony Capitalists — those people pretending to be free market participants, and who merely pretend to be creating value. They are taking credit for structural successes that would have occurred with or without them. What they are actually doing is capturing value, not creating it — and then transferring it from its true owners (shareholders/investors) to themselves.

This is wrong; it is legalized theft.

If you want to see a good example of how CEOs transfer shareholder wealth to themselves, a good place to start is Roger Lowenstein’s 2004 book, Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing. The section on CEO compensation is astounding; these guys were essentially getting wildly overcompensated for being CEOs during a bull market. The prime example was the CEO of Heinz, who gave himself (with the tacit approval of his Board of~~Crony~~ Directors) a $90 million bonus. And this was back in the early 1990s, when $90 million was real money.

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www.ritholtz.com

Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs Asset Management announced that it would launch a new mutual fund that — apparently — will bring the joy of hedge fund investing to the masses. For as little as $1,000, the Multi-Manager Alternatives Fund (GMAMX) allows mom-and-pop investors to put their life savings into some of Wall Street’s riskiest and most expensive products. This “fund of funds” will, according to its prospectus, let investors gain exposure to the trading strategies of hedge funds...

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Billionaire George Soros’s Latest Stock Picks (InsiderMonkey) George Soros is best known for the fortune he made shorting the British pound in 1992, but he currently invests a considerable amount of money in equities and so is required to report many of his long positions in 13F filings. We’ve gone through the 13F for the third quarter of the year and compared Soros’s holdings at the end of September to three months earlier. Read on for our impression of his moves and compare them to what he's bought and sold before. AIG. American International Group, Inc. (NYSE::AIG) became Soros’s largest 13F equity holding during the third quarter with a position of over 15 million shares being reported in the filing. A number of value investors have been getting into the insurer over the course of the year, and at a P/B ratio of 0.5 it certainly looks cheap compared to the book value of its equity. We also like its earnings multiples- it trades at 9 times forward earnings estimates- and revenue was up strongly in the third quarter compared to the same period in 2011. Fellow billionaire Dan Loeb had initiated a position during the second quarter of 2012 and we think that it still looks like a good buy for investors. ...

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Tom Steyer New Investments
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BMW Pininfarina Gran Lusso Coupé.

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...

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6 Tips to Work From Home Successfully

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Today's top Green Energy Good News

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Texas is set to double its wind energy generation from 60 gigawatts to 120 gigawatts in 2013.

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