Jarden Compares Loan and Bond Costs

Jarden Corporation (Ticker JAH) is a diversified consumer products company whose brands include First Alert, Holmes, Mr. Coffee, and Sunbeam.  On June 30, 2009, it had approximately $2.7 billion of debt outstanding, half of which was in the form of Term Loans due...

Lehman Brothers v Morgan Stanley

We hope everyone is having happy holidays. Last time, we defended Lehman Brothers from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s attack in Too Big to Fail. We’ve stolen some time from the seasonal festivities to take another look at the numbers, and we still feel there’s a strong case to...

Lehman Did Everything Right

Except convince anyone it was doing anything right at all. In his new book Too Big to Fail, Andrew Ross Sorkin portrays the firm’s fall as a tale of arrogance, blindness, stupidity, complacency, and greed – nearly every vice but gluttony and lust. But the numbers...

Liquidity Position

There are lots of measures of liquidity. The classics are the current ratio and the quick ratio, but they’ve fallen out of favor because they don’t include cash flow, a critical component of liquidity. Cash burn is too recent to be classic, even though...

Off-Balance-Sheet Debt at BT Group

 The heavy burden of hidden debt BT Group, plc, is one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies. Since the telecom crash in 2001, it’s been struggling with operating, management, and reporting problems. You can add financial problems to the list as well....