Features of the week

So many interesting news items and stories to share with you this Friday, I'm almost unsure of where to begin. Let's jump right into this latest edition of our, "Features of the week".

1. Bear Stearns takes $1.9bn writedown on mortgage assets and reports its first quarterly loss in 84 years as a public firm.

2. Merrill Lynch may get $5bn cash prop from Singapore's Temasek Holdings.

3. Putin, the Kremlin power struggle, and the $40bn fortune. Wow. (Hat tip to 321gold).

4. Can Greed Save Africa?. Great article from BusinessWeek.

5. Bill Gross joins FT's View from the Top to talk about interest rates, US recession, subprime, and investments.

6. Ron Paul talks to Maria Bartiromo in a recent BusinessWeek interview.

7. Comparison: Presidential candidates on monetary policy and USD.

8. The Art of the Deal. How the Nahmad family made billions trading art.

9. Faustian Bargain: Bloomberg special report on the credit crisis.

10. Auschwitz slave recalls concentration camp's horrors.

11. Israel's Karma Kosher conscripts seek refuge in Goa.

12. Rampant global money printing and the case for gold.

13. CPI: Sophisticated economic theory, terrible ethics.

14. Did you catch Financial Sense Newshour's annual Gold Show broadcast?

15. Latest commentary from Dr. Marc Faber: 2008 outlook.

16. Ethanol: Government vs. the Environment.

17. Russia's RTS may surge to 3,000 in 2008, banks forecast.

18. The Oil Drum's take on food price inflation.

Enjoy this week's posts? Bookmark us and tell a few friends! Thanks, and have a great weekend, everyone.

Seth Klarman: Margin of Safety (pdf)

Welcome, readers! Signup for free email updates at the Finance Trends Newsletter . Update: PDF links removed due to DMCA notice. Please see our extensive Klarman book notes below. New visitors, please check the Finance Trends home page for all new posts. Here's something for anyone who has been trying to get a look at Seth Klarman's now famous, and out of print, 1991 investment book, Margin of Safety . My knowledge of value investing is pretty much limited to what I've read in Ben Graham's The Intelligent Investor (the book which originally popularized the investment concept of a "Margin of Safety"), so check out the wisdom from Seth Klarman and other investing greats in our related posts below. You can also go straight to Ronald Redfield's Margin of Safety book notes . Related posts: 1. Seth Klarman interviews and Margin of Safety notes 2. Seth Klarman: Lessons from 2008 3. Investing Lessons from Sir John Templeton 4.

Clean Money - John Rubino: Book review

Clean Money by John Rubino 274 pages. Hoboken, New Jersey John Wiley & Sons. 2009. 1st Edition. The bouyant stock market environment of the past several years is gone, and the financial wreckage of 2008 is still sharp in our minds as a new year starts to unfold. Given the recent across-the-board-declines in global stock markets (and most asset classes) that have left many investors shell-shocked, you might wonder if there is any good reason to consider the merits of a hot new investment theme, such as clean energy. However, we shouldn't be too hasty to write off all future stock investments. After all, the market declines of 2008 may continue into 2009, but they may also leave interesting investment opportunities in their wake. Which brings us to the subject of this review. John Rubino, author and editor of GreenStockInvesting.com , recently released a new book on renewable energy and clean-tech investing entitled, Clean Money: Picking Winners in the Green Tech Boom . In Clean

Slate profiles Victor Niederhoffer

Slate's recent profile of writer/speculator, Vic Niederhoffer has been getting some attention from traders and finance types in recent days. I thought we'd take a look at it here too, to offer up some possible educational value from Vic's experiences with trading and loss. Here's an excerpt from Slate's profile of Victor Niederhoffer : " I've enjoyed getting your e-mails. It sounds like you've thought a lot about being wrong. Well, the reason you contacted me, to call a spade a spade, is that I'm sort of infamous for having made a big, notorious, terrible error not once but twice in my market career. Let's talk about those errors. The first was your investment in the Thai baht, which pretty much wiped you out when the Thai stock market crashed in 1997. I made so many errors there it's pathetic. I made one of my favorite errors: "The mouse with one hole is quickly cornered." That is key. There are certain decisions you make in li

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