Archive for March 15th, 2010
Is Another Chinese Reserve Rate Hike Coming Tonight?
Will the Chinese hike reserves again in the next few hours?
Obviously only a select few in Beijing know for sure, but it wouldn’t be a surprise.
All of the People’s Congress stuff is over, so that’s out of the way. And the National Statistics Bureau was supposed to release Fixed Asset numbers yesterday, but they were delayed for a day.
Now would be the perfect time: release the data, and tell banks to press on the break pedals once again.
Consider, too, that the last few reserve hikes came mid-month (Jan 12 and Feb 12), so the timing would consistent with prior moves.
Andrew Barber of Waverly Advisors suggests that if anything one is coming out in the next few days, at a minimum. Morgan Stanley out with a note predicting one imminently as well.
Stay tuned…
In the meantime, check out the 15 facts about China that will blow your mind >
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See Also:
- Asia Down, Futures Heading Lower As Chinese Tightening Fears Once Again Come To The Fore
- Shanghai Plummets 2.5% Ahead Of Possible Tightening, US Drifts Lower
- Morgan Stanley: Don’t Be Fooled, The Chinese Aren’t Really Tightening Lending At All
Toyota: Runaway Prius Guy Jim Sikes Is Balloon-Boy 2
The appropriate word here would probably be “busted.”
“My Prius went wild!” guy Jim Sikes apparently didn’t realize his car carried the equivalent of an airliner’s Black Box.
Ah, well. Live and learn, Jim. In the Big House.
Alexandra Berzon and Kate Linebaugh, WSJ: Toyota Motor Corp. said Monday there are “significant inconsistencies” between a California man’s account of how his Prius hybrid accelerated out of control last week and the car maker’s preliminary investigation of the vehicle.
The driver, James Sikes, said he applied heavy pressure to the brake pedal while the car traveled at high speeds in an attempt to stop it. But Toyota disputed that account.
“We believe the vehicle was being driven with the front brakes lightly applied,” Bob Waltz, Toyota’s U.S. vice president for product, quality and service support, said at a press conference in San Diego.
Mr. Waltz said data captured by the car indicated that the brakes and accelerator were depressed about 250 different times during the incident.
Don’t miss: How Toyota destroyed itself in 10 easy steps >
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Meet The 24-Year Old Harvard Grad That Was The Inspiration For Michael Lewis’s The Big Short
This is cool:
Deal Journal has yet to read “The Big Short,” Michael Lewis’s yarn on the financial crisis that hit stores today. We did, however, read his acknowledgments, where Lewis praises “A.K. Barnett-Hart, a Harvard undergraduate who had just written a thesis about the market for subprime mortgage-backed CDOs that remains more interesting than any single piece of Wall Street research on the subject.”
While unsure if we can stomach yet another book on the crisis, a killer thesis on the topic? Now that piqued our curiosity. We tracked down Barnett-Hart, a 24-year-old financial analyst at a large New York investment bank. She met us for coffee last week to discuss her thesis, “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis.” Handed in a year ago this week at the depths of the market collapse, the paper was awarded summa cum laude and won virtually every thesis prize, including the Harvard Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly work.
Read the whole story at Deal Journal >
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HBO’s New Pitch For Subscribers: A Show About Post-Katrina New Orleans (TWX)
Aiming to keep its subscriber base and premium subscriptions on the rise in 2010, HBO has been concentrating on a new slate of originals including new miniseries The Pacific, which premiered on Sunday.
On April 11, Time Warner’s HBO will debut their new drama Treme. Brought to subscribers by the creators of critical hit The Wire, the hour-long drama will follow struggling musicians and New Orleans natives as they deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
New Orleans residents are included in the cast, adding to a line-up of lead actors including John Goodman, Wendell Pierce and Steve Zahn.
The show’s pilot was greenlit after Fox’s K-Ville, the post-Katrina detective drama, was canceled in May 2008.
Time Warner CEO and chairman Jeff Bewkes told analysts during an earnings call that combining HBO’s quality TV shows with new services like their HBO Go online video site will translate into “very strong, across-the-board revenue growth for HBO, both subscriber growth and pricing growth at wholesale,” he said.
HBO’s risky vampire drama True Blood was credited with bringing in new subscribers during its first season. But can Treme and The Pacific bring in some fresh, paying consumers?
Watch the Treme trailer here to see:
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See Also:
- HBO GO Launches Live On Verizon FiOS Thursday, Links With Fancast
- HBO’s Answer To Hulu Preps For Big Debut
- Nick Bilton: HBO GO Is The Best Online Video Service I Cannot Use
SXSW Attendees Rip Into Twitter CEO’s Keynote
Twitter CEO Ev Williams just delivered the keynote address at SXSW.
It did not go well.
(Remember Sarah Lacy’s horrible interview keynote with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2008? This was worse)
The problem — apart from the news out of Twitter being much less exciting than expected — was the interviewer, Harvard Business Review’s Umair Haque.
Umair is in the “thought leader” business. His writing generally draws more than its fair share of criticism for being heavy on buzzwords and light on substance, but he has a large base of supporters as well.
The reaction to his performance at SXSW was much more one-sided. Numerous reports had a large portion of the audience walking out in the middle of the address. And for many, the most entertaining part of the Umair/Ev event was the stream of insulting tweets that started almost as soon as the event began.
See what people had to say about the SXSW keynote >
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See Also:
- How AT&T Hopes To Save Its A** At SXSW
- How To Not Be A Jerk At SXSW
- Twitter Announces "@Anywhere" For Deeper Integration With Third Party Sites