Thursday, April 3, 2008

Is Soros a Commi?

In times of financial crisis, job cuts seem the thing to do. Both Merrill Lynch (MER: 45.04 -0.30 -0.66%) and Lehman Brothers (LEH: 43.67 -0.40 -0.91%) may cut more employees than previously anticipated, and this time it seems they want to do it quietly without major announcements. The big question is whether these job cuts will help these companies by cutting costs or whether they will be too little too late and end up harming the company by getting rid of needed talent.
George Soros thinks the markets will fall further in the next year and that the current “bottom” is not the end of the fall. He thinks that financial institutions should be far better regulated and that many OTC products such as swaps should be conducted through regulated exchanges that have predetermined margin requirements and guarantee the credit-worthiness of the counterparties.
In many cases, it may be simply too complicated to set up an exchange for many of these products as there are so many ways of packaging them and each may not have enough daily volume to justify being listed. However, in a time like this where credit worthiness is of such importance, moving more products from OTC to exchanges may be something to look into.

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