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abu yahya's definitions

(US BUSINESS LAW) a type of business organization which is a cross between a partnership and a corporation. In a private partnership, all of the partners own all the assets in common and have unlimited liability; in a corporation, the firm assets are owned by a legal "person," and shareholders are liable only for the value of their stake (equity) in the firm.

Partnerships have higher risk for members, but their management can disclose a lot less and the taxes are lower. Limited/limited liability partnerships represent a compromise.

In a limited partnership, one or more of the partners has unlimited liability ("general partners") and the others have liability limited to their equity stake in the firm ("limited partners"). A limited partnership is indicated by the initials "LP" after the name, e.g. Apollo Management, LP.

In a limited liability partnership, all members have limited liability; specifically, the other partners of the LLP are shielded from torts for malpractice against the other partners, BUT they are legally responsible for financial claims against the whole organization. LLP liability varies somewhat by state law (several US states do not permit LLP's at all), and somewhat by the terms of the LLP agreement for that particular partnership.

Apologies to Urban Dictionary for an error in the definition of private equity fund and hedge fund: both types of fund are almost never LLP's; they are often limited partnerships (LP's).
The limited liability partnership is a popular form of business organization for lawyers and other professionals.
by Abu Yahya September 2, 2010
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squeeze the shorts

(FINANCE) hilarious term used for over a century in the trading of stocks, commodities, etc. A way in which someone who controls much of the outstanding shares of stock can make a lot of money while ruining those who are betting against the stock.

A "short" is traditionally someone with expertise in shorting a stock, i.e., managing to borrow shares and sell them in anticipation of a decline in value. Obviously, if there are many people shorting a particular stock at any given time, and if they are wrong about the future, then a steep rise in value if the share price will not only cause them to lose money, it will force panic purchases of stock as the traders attempt to cover their shorts. If the instigator of the squeeze is successful, he will have a corner, and drive the price of the stock up to absurd levels.

An unsuccessful squeeze of shorts in a copper trust triggered the Crisis of 1907. That, in turn, triggered the Aldrich–Vreeland Act (May 1908).
The brokers, after awhile, commenced to borrow large amounts of the stock. This convinced the insiders that there was a big short interest somewhere, and they got together in order to squeeze the shorts... They never awakened to the fact that the {president of the company} had sold out on them... {and were totally ruined}

Henry Clews, Victor Niederhoffer, *Fifty Years in Wall Street*, p.149
by Abu Yahya April 5, 2010
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dividends

(FINANCE) a quarterly payment that companies make to owners of their stock. In theory, the source of the company's stock's intrinsic value.

A company's dividends are usually chosen to be as regular as possible; they can be considerably lower than the company's quarterly earnings, provided the company is growing in value. They are important, because they are the direct motivation to buy the stock.
The earnings from stock consist of capital gains and dividends.
by Abu Yahya April 15, 2010
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reserve requirements

(FINANCE) the amount of bank reserves that a bank must keep in storage to meet unexpected liabilities.

Banks are not allowed to lend out 100% of the money they receive as deposits; if they did, then depositors would be unable to take money out of the bank. On the other hand, the bank has to lend most of the money out, since it needs the income earned from interest on loans. Throughout the history of the Usonian banking system, the US states or the federal government have had rules about interest rates, reserves, and financial accounting used by banks.

Reserve requirements are necessary to mitigate the risk of bank runs; this was thought to have disappeared thanks to deposit insurance, but Washington Mutual experienced a bank run in 2008 that forced it into receivership.
In the USA, reserves have been set by law for centuries; as a percentage of liabilities, this percentage has declined over the centuries to its current level of 3-10% (as of 1992). In the Eurozone, this rate is 2%; in Japan, it is about 1.5%; and in Commonwealth countries like the UK & Canada, it is voluntary--there are no reserve requirements.
by Abu Yahya September 4, 2010
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austerity program

(ECONOMICS) when a government has to restructure spending by massively cutting social programs, development programs, and subsidies on basic necessities. Often accompanied by taxes increases, especially on lower incomes (since the poor cannot escape tax hikes).
Usually we use the term "austerity program" when the government in question has to backtrack on its ideological commitments. An example of this is France, after June 1982. The Socialist government of Mitterrand had just implemented a raft of major new social welfare programs, and was promptly forced to cut everything back when the deficit ballooned.
by Abu Yahya May 5, 2010
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moral panic

an overwrought public anxiety that evil things are afoot. The term seems to have been coined by Jock Young in 1971.* The most obvious example of an ancient moral panic is the blood libel.

Other famous examples of moral panics include the 1955 Boise scandal, in which three cases of lewd conduct between men and teenaged boys, plus a noxious editorial, triggered a general war against homosexual men. In the early 1930's, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) launched a public relations effort to have federal laws passed banning the use of marijuana; it was driven by a jurisdictional struggle between Harry Anslinger (FBN) and J. Edgar Hoover (FBI). The campaign was a success; it not only achieved the desired legislation, but created a wave of mass hysteria about the "threat" of marijuana.

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* Goode & Ben-Yehuda, *Moral Panics* (1994), p.12.
In the movie *Quadrophenia*, set in Brighton, UK in the late 1960's, a recurring theme was the contemporary moral panic over the clash between Mods and Rockers.
by Abu Yahya February 15, 2009
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rational expectations hypothesis

*noun*; a method of representing the economy as the sum of many identical individuals and firms, each represented by a system of mathematical equations. The Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH) takes its name from the premise that economic actors, i.e., everyone, do not make consistent errors about the present or future behavior of markets.

REH was devised mainly as a rebuke to Keynesian economics, and in particular, the strategy of fiscal policy or monetary policy.

According to the REH, fiscal policy does not alter aggregate demand because the "average" person recognizes that her lifetime income is not increasing--so she needs to save rather than spend the stimulus money, in anticipation of higher taxes in the future.

At the same time, monetary policy does not work because it relies on lowering interest rates to make more money available; more money means inflation, but people have to be deceived into thinking prices for their product are going up, so they will expand production. According to REH, people or firms will figure this out, and see increased demand as mere inflation. Instead of increasing output and employment, they'll want to raise prices so they can meet their future bills.

According to REH, both monetary and fiscal policy rely on illusions to work; and since people (on average) will make rational estimates o the future, they will defeat these illusions.
The rational expectations hypothesis states that we can break the realization of a return into an expected return that depends on the current information set and an unexpected component that depends only on new information.
by Abu Yahya March 3, 2009
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