In the TD Ameritrade retirement services commercial below, the firm’s “Nest Egg Ninjas” try to get your assets to manage. Memo to ad execs or anyone else anyone trying to be “hip” with ninja references: the only time a ninja reference is cool is if you’re referring to actual ninjas.

When I was writing my 2011 rate outlook last month, I asked some former colleagues—CFA types much smarter than me—for their views on what a possible municipal bond implosion might mean for mortgage backed securities (MBS). I asked because consumer mortgage rates are tied to MBS, and I was testing a theory on whether MBS [...]

One interesting stat coming from today’s November jobs report is on financial services jobs: monthly job losses in this category averaged 29,000 in 2009, but have since decelerated to 8,000 per month in 2010. See chart below.

ABC news reported, via their WTVD affiliate in North Carolina that 71-year-old Bernie Madoff may have been assaulted in prison, where he began a 150 year sentence in July. The report said he was discharged from Duke University Hospital two days ago after being treated for facial fractures, broken ribs and a collapsed lung.

Someone sent the graph below comparing stock indices to San Francisco Real Estate form 2000 to present. Obviously there are a lot of assumptions here and this cannot dictate any individual’s property investment decision, but worthy of debate. One of The Basis Point’s investment management contributors had this to say about it:

Of all the Madoff ponzi scheme and accompanying credit market madness, this is a fitting end, courtesy of The Daily Show’s John Oliver.

Madoff gets maximum 150 years in prison for his career-long money management ponzi scheme.

From the Wall Street Journal: BlackRock Inc. reached an agreement to buy Barclays Global Investors from Barclays PLC for $13.5 billion, creating a money-management titan roughly twice the size of its closest competitor.

You have to be suspect when financial decision makers start talking about reinventing the game of finance like Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner did today. The first time in recent history was in 1994 when Salomon Brothers bond genius John Meriwether founded hedge fund Long Term Capital Management with a group of ‘financial engineers’ who were [...]