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Merle Hazard il menestrello investitore
Merle Hazard is the first and only country singer to write about mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, and physics. He is perhaps best known for his songs about the recent recession and credit crisis.
He may live in Nashville, but investment advisor Jon Shayne is becoming the “Weird Al” of Wall Street.
Shayne — or rather, his made-up persona of country singer “Merle Hazard” — has been amusing the financial world with satirical country tunes about hedge funds and derivatives. Hazard has become an Internet phenomenon thanks to YouTube videos that have caught the attention of bloggers among the financial cognoscenti, most recently with the song “Bailout,” which debuted Sunday.
Shayne hopes his songs can help people help make sense of the financial mess we’re in — or at least get a chuckle.
“Some things are so important you have to joke about them,” he says.
But he also hopes they contribute to the debate over economic policy going forward.
Hazard is the occasional comedic sideline of a man who spends most days in the more serious business of managing some $100 million for clients through his boutique firm Shayne & Co. in Green Hills. Shayne, 47, a value investor in the Benjamin Graham/Warren Buffett vein, says he’s achieved 10.2 percent net annualized returns for a standard account composite (comprised of “normal” client accounts) from the first quarter of 1995 through the second quarter of 2009. The mix of stocks, Treasuries and cash outperformed the 6.4 percent annualized return hosted by the Standard & Poor’s 500 for the same period.
“I wrote a song about hedge funds exploding, but it wasn’t about me,” he says. “I was holding more cash than most because I couldn’t find any stocks to buy.”
That song, “H-E-D-G-E,” a play on the Tammy Wynette hit “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” came out in 2007, shortly after Shayne came up with the Hazard character while talking with a friend about the credit crisis just beginning to rear its head.
“I was talking with Josh May (managing director of Medley Global Advisors’ Nashville office) about how it was going to turn out to be a festival for moral hazard,” Shayne says. “We thought, ‘Boy, that sounds like the name of a country singer.’ ”
Merle Hazard may sound like an homage to country legend Merle Haggard, but it’s really a play on the investment term “moral hazard,” which means a party who isn’t exposed to risk will act differently than one who is, due to isolation from consequences.
Initially Shayne thought the lark would take off among other financial professionals. But it picked up steam among journalists and bloggers, and the clever lyrics and persona have gained him attention from the likes of The Economist, The Financial Times, the New York Times, National Public Radio and even Irish Public Radio. His YouTube videos have gotten more than 200,000 hits. They can be seen at www.merlehazard.com.
University instructors have even brought Merle Hazard and his lyrics into the classroom, including professor Bob Lloyd, who used the songs to discuss hedges, swaps, derivatives, margin calls and collateralized debt obligations in his “Introduction to Business Transactions” class at the University of Tennessee’s College of Law. The material also has popped up in finance and banking courses at the University of Sydney in Australia, Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of the Pacific and Vanderbilt University.
“Much of the reporting about the financial crisis has been either dry or apocalyptic. It took a Merle Hazard to make all this understandable,” says former Vanderbilt spokesman Mike Schoenfeld, who encouraged Shayne to post his videos online and helped him make media connections.
Merle Hazard stayed mum last year, as the dire scenario Shayne predicted began to play out, culminating in the fourth quarter failure of Wall Street giants Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns due in part to their taking inordinate and unsustainable amounts of risk on financial instruments that were based on shaky to nonexistent assets.
He has come out with three songs so far this year, including “Mark to Market,” “Inflation or Deflation” and “Bailout.”
But the names and references remain something of an inside joke among members of the academic, financial and media circles who are sophisticated enough to recognize names like Arthur Laffer and Milton Friedman and catch the pointed commentary and sharp digs Shayne weaves into his lyrics. The song “In the Hamptons,” the lament of an over-leveraged mortgage bond trader, features an appearance by Reagan-era supply-side economist Laffer, who now lives in Nashville.
“There are some very sharp points and in-jokes. Arthur Laffer saying, ‘Don’t worry, it will trickle down’ is hilarious, if you get it,” Schoenfeld says.
Artists have always used music for social commentary. Woody Guthrie sang about the Great Depression; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young sang about the Vietnam War and protests; and Alan Jackson wrote “Where Were You” about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Recently, Music Row artists have written about the dark side of the financial crisis, with songs like John Rich’s “Shutting Detroit Down” and Hank Williams Jr.’s “Red, White and Pink-Slip Blues” expressing working families’ anger over the economic meltdown.
In “Bailout,” Shayne, as Merle Hazard, sympathizes
Read more: Financial advisor tackles meltdown with alter ego - Nashville Business Journal
E se fosse proprio Merle il vero Guru
Merle Hazard is the first and only country singer to write about mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, and physics. He is perhaps best known for his songs about the recent recession and credit crisis.
He may live in Nashville, but investment advisor Jon Shayne is becoming the “Weird Al” of Wall Street.
Shayne — or rather, his made-up persona of country singer “Merle Hazard” — has been amusing the financial world with satirical country tunes about hedge funds and derivatives. Hazard has become an Internet phenomenon thanks to YouTube videos that have caught the attention of bloggers among the financial cognoscenti, most recently with the song “Bailout,” which debuted Sunday.
Shayne hopes his songs can help people help make sense of the financial mess we’re in — or at least get a chuckle.
“Some things are so important you have to joke about them,” he says.
But he also hopes they contribute to the debate over economic policy going forward.
Hazard is the occasional comedic sideline of a man who spends most days in the more serious business of managing some $100 million for clients through his boutique firm Shayne & Co. in Green Hills. Shayne, 47, a value investor in the Benjamin Graham/Warren Buffett vein, says he’s achieved 10.2 percent net annualized returns for a standard account composite (comprised of “normal” client accounts) from the first quarter of 1995 through the second quarter of 2009. The mix of stocks, Treasuries and cash outperformed the 6.4 percent annualized return hosted by the Standard & Poor’s 500 for the same period.
“I wrote a song about hedge funds exploding, but it wasn’t about me,” he says. “I was holding more cash than most because I couldn’t find any stocks to buy.”
That song, “H-E-D-G-E,” a play on the Tammy Wynette hit “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” came out in 2007, shortly after Shayne came up with the Hazard character while talking with a friend about the credit crisis just beginning to rear its head.
“I was talking with Josh May (managing director of Medley Global Advisors’ Nashville office) about how it was going to turn out to be a festival for moral hazard,” Shayne says. “We thought, ‘Boy, that sounds like the name of a country singer.’ ”
Merle Hazard may sound like an homage to country legend Merle Haggard, but it’s really a play on the investment term “moral hazard,” which means a party who isn’t exposed to risk will act differently than one who is, due to isolation from consequences.
Initially Shayne thought the lark would take off among other financial professionals. But it picked up steam among journalists and bloggers, and the clever lyrics and persona have gained him attention from the likes of The Economist, The Financial Times, the New York Times, National Public Radio and even Irish Public Radio. His YouTube videos have gotten more than 200,000 hits. They can be seen at www.merlehazard.com.
University instructors have even brought Merle Hazard and his lyrics into the classroom, including professor Bob Lloyd, who used the songs to discuss hedges, swaps, derivatives, margin calls and collateralized debt obligations in his “Introduction to Business Transactions” class at the University of Tennessee’s College of Law. The material also has popped up in finance and banking courses at the University of Sydney in Australia, Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of the Pacific and Vanderbilt University.
“Much of the reporting about the financial crisis has been either dry or apocalyptic. It took a Merle Hazard to make all this understandable,” says former Vanderbilt spokesman Mike Schoenfeld, who encouraged Shayne to post his videos online and helped him make media connections.
Merle Hazard stayed mum last year, as the dire scenario Shayne predicted began to play out, culminating in the fourth quarter failure of Wall Street giants Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns due in part to their taking inordinate and unsustainable amounts of risk on financial instruments that were based on shaky to nonexistent assets.
He has come out with three songs so far this year, including “Mark to Market,” “Inflation or Deflation” and “Bailout.”
But the names and references remain something of an inside joke among members of the academic, financial and media circles who are sophisticated enough to recognize names like Arthur Laffer and Milton Friedman and catch the pointed commentary and sharp digs Shayne weaves into his lyrics. The song “In the Hamptons,” the lament of an over-leveraged mortgage bond trader, features an appearance by Reagan-era supply-side economist Laffer, who now lives in Nashville.
“There are some very sharp points and in-jokes. Arthur Laffer saying, ‘Don’t worry, it will trickle down’ is hilarious, if you get it,” Schoenfeld says.
Artists have always used music for social commentary. Woody Guthrie sang about the Great Depression; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young sang about the Vietnam War and protests; and Alan Jackson wrote “Where Were You” about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Recently, Music Row artists have written about the dark side of the financial crisis, with songs like John Rich’s “Shutting Detroit Down” and Hank Williams Jr.’s “Red, White and Pink-Slip Blues” expressing working families’ anger over the economic meltdown.
In “Bailout,” Shayne, as Merle Hazard, sympathizes
Read more: Financial advisor tackles meltdown with alter ego - Nashville Business Journal
E se fosse proprio Merle il vero Guru
