“If you can’t sell what you want, you sell what you can”

“Think again of LTCM – if you have to generate cash and you can’t sell what you want to sell, you sell what you can sell” was written by financial author Richard Bookstaber on his blog on July 8. 2007. “If you can’t sell what you want to sell, you sell what you can sell,” the New York (NY) Times quoted Bookstaber on August 12, 2007. The book The Subprime Virus: Reckless Credit, Regulatory Failure, and Next Steps (2011) credited Bookstaber for the financial saying:
   
“In the words of onetime fund manager Richard Bookstaber, ‘If you can’t sell what you want to sell, you sell what you can sell.’”
 
“It’s the old adage: When you can’t sell what you want to sell, you sell what you can” was cited in print in 2014.
     
   
Wikipedia: Richard Bookstaber
Richard Bookstaber (born 1950) is the author of Option Pricing and Strategies in Investing and A Demon Of Our Own Design, a book highlighting the fragility of the financial system that occurs from tight coupling and complexity. The book is noted for its foreshadowing of the financial crisis of 2007–08.
   
Rick Bookstaber
SUNDAY, JULY 8, 2007
What sorts of crises am I worried about now?
(...)
Think again of LTCM – if you have to generate cash and you can’t sell what you want to sell, you sell what you can sell.
 
New York (NY) Times
August 12, 2007
In a Credit Crisis, Large Mortgages Grow Costly
By FLOYD NORRIS and ERIC DASH
(...)
“You find surprising linkages that you never would have expected,” said Richard Bookstaber, a former hedge fund manager and author of a new book, “A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds and the Perils of Financial Innovation.”
 
“What matters is who owns what, who is under pressure to sell, and what else do they own,” he said. People with mortgage securities found they could not sell them, and so they sold other things. “If you can’t sell what you want to sell,” he said, “you sell what you can sell.”
   
Rick Bookstaber
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2007
The Myth of Noncorrelation
[This is a modified version of an article I wrote that appeared in the September issue of Institutional Investor].
(...)
Just like complexity, the tight coupling born of leverage can lead to surprising linkages between markets. High leverage in one market can end up devastating another, unrelated, perfectly healthy market. This happens when a market under stress becomes illiquid and fund managers must look to other markets: If you can’t sell what you want to sell, you sell what you can. This puts pressure on markets that have nothing to do with the original problem, other than that they happened to be home to securities held by a fund in trouble. Now other highly leveraged funds with similar exposure in these markets are forced to sell, and the cycle continues. This may be how the subprime mess expanded beyond mortgages and credit markets to end up stressing quantitative equity hedge funds, funds that had nothing to do with subprime mortgages.
   
Google Books
The Subprime Virus:
Reckless Credit, Regulatory Failure, and Next Steps
By Kathleen C. Engel and Patricia A. McCoy
New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc.
2011
Pg. 75:
In the words of onetime fund manager Richard Bookstaber, “If you can’t sell what you want to sell, you sell what you can sell.”
 
Twitter
John Needham
‏@johnpneedham
Wall St. Saying: When you can’t sell what you want to sell, you sell what you can sell. Today: stocks, gold, oil, others, all down.
10:07 PM - 4 Aug 2011
 
Twitter
Barry Ritholtz
‏@ritholtz
CASHIN: When you can’t sell what you want (Europe; price too low) then you sell what you can (U.S. stocks).
2:22 PM - 3 Dec 2013
   
Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia)
Why the bond market is more fragile
BERNARD CONDON AAP OCTOBER 02, 2014 10:44AM
(...)
Then contagion struck. It became difficult to unload those bonds at decent prices, because so many funds in these “crowded trades” were trying to dump them. So managers desperate to shore up their funds started selling bonds from relatively healthy countries like Peru, the Philippines and South Korea, says Manoj Pradhan, a senior economist at Morgan Stanley.
 
“It’s the old adage: When you can’t sell what you want to sell, you sell what you can,” Pradhan says.