'Spiv' of the month ...

WTF?_2

What with all the hypocritical blaming of short sellers for the ills of the market, thought this tidbit on Peston's blog was interesting:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2008/09/british_banks_shorted.html

While we're on the subject of shorting, the scariest disclosure of the past 24 hours was that John Paulson has made bets of around £1bn that the share prices of our biggest banks are on their way down.
He's the hedge-fund megastar, the founder of New York's Paulson & Co, who made several billions last year short-selling collateralised debt obligations.
If he thinks our banks are almost as structurally flawed as investments created out of subprime rubbish, well that's not altogether reassuring.

(Not the treasury secretary, Henry Paulson).

It's one thing to hold off on buying a house coz you think the market is going to fall, but you're in a whole new league to be betting a billion dollars on saying that the worsening market is going to mean that the UKs banking sector is screwed.

dopester

He can probably afford it, but I still think the incredible surge late last week and on Monday would have been very painful and knocked out a lot of shorters who'd piled in doing the same.

Generali

!!!!!!? wrote: »

What with all the hypocritical blaming of short sellers for the ills of the market, thought this tidbit on Peston's blog was interesting:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2008/09/british_banks_shorted.html

While we're on the subject of shorting, the scariest disclosure of the past 24 hours was that John Paulson has made bets of around £1bn that the share prices of our biggest banks are on their way down.
He's the hedge-fund megastar, the founder of New York's Paulson & Co, who made several billions last year short-selling collateralised debt obligations.
If he thinks our banks are almost as structurally flawed as investments created out of subprime rubbish, well that's not altogether reassuring.

(Not the treasury secretary, Henry Paulson).

It's one thing to hold off on buying a house coz you think the market is going to fall, but you're in a whole new league to be betting a billion dollars on saying that the worsening market is going to mean that the UKs banking sector is screwed.

As an aside, when Hank Paulson became Treasury Secretary he had to sell all his stock in Goldmans he'd accumulated in bonuses. Goldmans gave him permission to sell stock he wasn't entitled to sell yet.

The stock was worth $800,000,000 and was trading at about $150. It's now down to $128 so he has 'saved', $64,000,000. For Hank, the $64,000,000 question was, "Fancy joining the Treasury old boy?"