Harry Newton on Auction Rate Securities (ARS)

Harry Newton has excellent coverage of the Auction Rate Securities (ARS) disaster on his web site, www.AuctionRatePreferreds.org, including background, news, resources, and names of real live people to contact about problems people are having with these securities which were improperly marketed as being "just as good (and liquid) as cash."

Many if not most auction rate securities are sold in the form of closed-end funds. Some are referred to as Auction Rate Preferred Securities (ARPS). Some are referred to as Auction Preferred Securities (APS.)

The news is starting to get a little more optimistic, but there is still quite a long way to go before this mess is cleaned up.

Alas, we are unable to count on any assistance on this front from former anti-Wall Street crusader and now (at least for the moment) New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. It would appear that he is... ummm... "indisposed"... at the moment. Spitzer's lone contribution to making the outlook for ARS look sunnier was to instigate a scandal even more negative than what was going on with ARS. If anybody believed that nothing could be more negative than the disaster on the ARS front, Spitzer clearly proved them wrong! Good luck, Eliot in your future endeavors!

Be sure to check out Harry Newton's In Search of the Perfect Investment web site for daily doses of information on all manner of topics related to investment, speculation, trading, finance, economics, and technology and life in general.

-- Jack Krupansky