A Finance Minister Fit for a Greek Tragedy?

At home, “V Is for Varoufakis” posters hung in the windows of cafes. Greeks showered him with love, twittered over his looks, and wrote adoring satires of his glamorous life and wide-ranging talents. Varoufakis’s oldest friends were bewildered by the international fuss, but everyone I’ve spoken to who knew him before this ministerial turn says Varoufakis’s behavior on the European stage is typical: He’s outspoken, passionate and confident about his ideas. That, apparently, was the problem, because Varoufakis did not go to Europe merely to negotiate Greece’s future. He had bigger ideas. He wanted to show the Europeans how to save Europe itself.

→ The New York Times Magazine

It Never Rains in California

Bill Gross on liquidity :

While private equity and hedge funds have built-in “gates” to prevent an overnight exit, mutual funds and ETFs do not. That an ETF can satisfy redemption with underlying bonds or shares, only raises the nightmare possibility of a disillusioned and uninformed public throwing in the towel once again after they receive thousands of individual odd lot pieces under such circumstances. But even in milder “left tail scenarios” it is price that makes the difference to mutual fund and ETF holders alike, and when liquidity is scarce, prices usually go down not up, given a Minsky moment.

→ Janus Capital

Bill Gross Gets Personal: ‘I Just Wanted to Run Money and Be Famous’

But make no mistake: This Bill Gross, the one eying the French crullers, isn’t that Bill Gross, the one who bent markets to his will at Pacific Investment Management Co., who built one of the most enduring track records in bond management history, who moved markets with his pronouncements. That old Gross wanted fame more than power and riches, and he wanted it with a hot eagerness that made enemies. By the time Pimco cast him out, he was considered by colleagues—there’s no way to sugarcoat this—to be a world-class jerk who’d lost his touch.

→ Bloomberg

The $80 Million Fake Bomb-Detector Scam

How could nearly 4,000 pounds of explosives have passed, undetected, into one of the city’s most tightly controlled areas ?

The first impulse was to look for infiltrators and collaborators. Some 60 suspects who had worked at checkpoints and local police posts near the bombings were rounded up. But the real problem, it turned out, was with the handheld bomb detectors being used at just about every Iraqi-run checkpoint in the country. They were toys. They had never worked. It had all been an expensive charade—costing the Iraqi government tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of lives—engineered by a portly middle-aged salesman in Britain.

→ Vanity Fair