Portfolio manager Cale Smith’s riffs on investing, spoke funds, and Islamorada in the Florida Keys.

From Bloomberg here:

Standard & Poor’s backtracked on ratings cuts issued last week and raised the ranking on commercial mortgage-backed debt from three bonds sold in 2007.

The securities, restored to top-ranked status, had been downgraded as recently as last week, making them ineligible for the Federal Reserve’s Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility to jumpstart lending.

In other words, one of the rating agencies whose previous negligence and/or greed was near the core of the global financial blow-up would like folks to believe that these securities actually deserved to go from being top-rated, or AAA, to BBB- and then back to AAA in the space of a single week.

Pay no attention to the fact those securities were owned by institutions that paid Standard & Poor’s to rate them and that given the dour state of commercial real estate, those institutions really, really need access to TALF.

Here’s more on the deeply flawed ratings agencies.

Have you seen this?

This is the application banks filled out to receive TARP funds.

The application is only two pages long. The first four pages are guidelines.

To receive billions of dollars in taxpayer money, banks had to answer just twenty simple questions. They were permitted to attach more info in response to one of those questions – but only if it took less than a page.

I think I answered twenty one questions to get the electronic toll pass on my windshield. And as Graydon Carter pointed out, if you wanted to open an account with Federal Express just to overnight the TARP application back to the Treasury Department, you’d need to fill out a three page, 74-question form.

Righty-o.

For Brandon in Albany, the books I would recommend to an MBA student if he could read only five:

1. The Definitive Drucker. The founding father of modern business management.

2. The Essays of Warren Buffett. To learn how to think independently about business and Wall Street.

3. Competitive Strategy. The book that launched a thousand consultancies. I actually prefer Competition Demystified, but to be fluent in strategy you’ve gotta know Porter’s classic.

4. The E-Myth Revisited. How to optimize the collection of processes that is a business.

5. The Marketing Gurus. Most business schools don’t teach sales, and marketing courses often assume a Fortune 500 sized budget. You may have to teach yourself about both. This book summarizes the classics from Jack Trout to Seth Godin and is a great place to start.

Any other suggestions?