Author: John Carney

Clients have gone crazy for Facebook, say four financial advisors who relate that clients are saying the darndest things.

Many of the hedge fund traders gathered at the Skybridge Alternatives investor summit in Las Vegas are enthusiastically seeking out the once "toxic" mortgage bonds for their portfolios.

The Volcker Rule is driving talented traders to leave large, well-known Wall Street investment banks for hedge funds, Reservoir Capital founder Daniel Stern said at the Skybridge Alternatives (aka SALT) investor summit Wednesday.

One of the more unexpected ideas to emerge from the Skybridge Alternatives investor summit has been investing in bonds issued by the government of Portugal.

After years in which trauma in the global macro-economy drove many investors toward so-called "global macro" strategies, there is now apparently a shift underway. And it is being felt on the ground level, by folks whose job it is to raise capital for hedge fund managers.

It’s become an annual ritual at the Milken Institute Global Conference: Nouriel Roubini faces off with Michael Milken. Milken is perpetually bullish on America, confident that our challenges can be overcome through innovation and market processes.

Walking around the halls or sitting in on the panels, you’ll hear talk about “soft patches” and “slow motion recovery.” Not from John Rogers Jr., founder and CEO of Ariel Investments:  “I’m very, very enthusiastic about the markets."

A New York City tech start-up just made a connection with a Paris fund that does a lot of Indian investment. Will anything come of it? Who knows. But it is this sort of thing, people from very different corners of the tech and finance world coming together, that makes the global conference so fascinating.

At a morning Milken Institute Global Conference panel on the overview for the United States economy, Milken Institute chief research officer Ross DeVol asked panelists whether “bond market vigilantes” would force up US interest rates in reaction to the federal government’s budget deficit.

In a decided bullish panel on commodities at the Milken Institute Global Conference, one area of bearishness stuck out: gold.

One of the hottest topics at this year's Milken Institute Global Conference is bound to be the Facebook IPO.

The array of people — from finance guys, to school teachers, to film producers, to specialists in aging well, to government officials (foreign and domestic) — is really extraordinary.

So what are the best alternative finance and economic blogs out there? To assemble our list, we polled our friends, our sources, and our followers on Twitter. And now, here’s the best of the web for 2012.