Matt Levine, Columnist

Sure, Blame the Compliance Consultant

Also spreadsheet mismatches, SPAC crackdown and interest-bearing stablecoins.

January 25, 2024 at 7:14 PM UTC

Corrected

February 1, 2024 at 8:56 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow, back on Monday.

A weird financial anomaly is that, in 2017 and 2018, the bonds of American Media Inc. started to trade at implausibly high prices. By late 2017, these bonds were trading at lower yields than the bonds of Apple Inc., implying that AMI — the small, non-investment-grade publisher of the National Enquirer — was a better credit than Apple. That seemed wrong. In 2018, AMI issued new bonds, at a much higher yield (10.5%) than the existing bonds, which also suggested that the prices of the existing bonds were wrong.