Mobile phone calls lowest in Finland, Netherlands and Sweden OECD. And highest in the US! Cheesy Collateral Keeps Italian Credit Flowing Amid Recession Bloomberg ISDA Launches CDS Marketplace Website ISDA (hat tip reader John O). The timing looks awfully sus…. Japan still a major factor in US Treasury market Japan Economy Watch The Paranoic Impulse […]
Read more...Well, Ken Rogoff does not do a Shakespearean turn, but he makes a badly needed observation in his latest piece at Project Syndicate, namely, that pinning a lot of blame for the crisis on the Lehman collapse is a faulty analysis. And he picks up a pet theme of ours, that patching up the system […]
Read more...I am cynical enough to believe that this signal, of having a CEO start his new job by going on holiday, is quite deliberate. We the great unwashed public are being given the message that we should not run Goldman operatives fine upstanding men like Edward Liddy out, because look what sort of commitment to […]
Read more...Served by Jesse of Le Café Américain “Flagrant evils cure themselves by being flagrant…” John Henry Newman Why the surprise? This is what the Wall Street banks do, even under a ‘reform’ administration. They use their customer money and public funds, for which they pay a pittance, to speculate in markets, distorting prices and taking […]
Read more...Submitted by Leo Kolivakis, publisher of Pension Pulse. Tara Perkins of the Globe and Mail reports that the life insurance industry pushes pension fix: Canada’s life insurers are proposing sweeping changes they say would allow the industry to help fix troubles in the pension system, lobbying against a push by some provinces for a new […]
Read more...‘Radical rethink’ needed on food BBC Treasurer Fear of Credit Freeze Seen in Cash Hoarding Bloomberg Card Users, Take Heart: One Penalty Is Vanishing New York Times Blodget Interviews Spitzer, His Former Nemesis Dealbook OPEC — those numbers just keep going up The Barrel (hat tip reader Michael). Production, that is. Troubled Assets May Still […]
Read more...Rolfe Winkler of Reuters and Louise Story of the New York Times sat in on the hearings on the SEC-Bank of America settlement today. Those who have followed this little drama may recall: Merrill paid its employees bonuses of $3.6 billion prior to the close of the deal with Bank of America. It was very […]
Read more...As the economy limps along, with jobs still falling (despite keen efforts to call a turn, and with the figures a bit more dodgy if you look under the hood), more and more overindebted and underemployed citizens are out on the street. Reports of tent encampments or parking lots with cars that serve as shelter […]
Read more...Japan may be on the verge of some major shifts, The fact that what amounts to one-party rule in Japan appears at an end ought to be significant, but the proof will be in the pudding. The island nation has been ruled by the Liberal Democratic Party for virtually the entire postwar period, with politics […]
Read more...We’ve been seeing an even higher than usual amount of skepticism on China’s official data releases, as if such a thing were even possible, given the general dim view of Chinese government data. Some observers, including yours truly, had looked to electrical usage as a better barometer of economic activity. Well, it turns out that […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns If you recall, at the end of May, I wrote a post “Both initial claims and continuing claims now pointing to recovery” that said jobless claims data were pointing to an imminent recovery. The general gist of my argument was recovery would come by year’s end or early […]
Read more...Vast expanses of Arctic melting fast Raw Story (hat tip reader John Doe) Scientists get closer to understanding ‘freak waves’ BBC The Recovery Edges Forward Tim Duy. I have a lot of respect for Duy, but the optimism is based on the jobs report, and I’ve seen some analyses that point to statistical anomalies, that […]
Read more...It was mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot who first discovered in 1962, by crunching 100 years of cotton trading data, that markets have “fat tails” or more extreme risks than the standard models predict. A less oft cited finding of Mandelbrot’s was that markets have memory, in colloquial terms. Calm days tend to be followed by calm […]
Read more...Today’s Financial Times highlights a possible target of regulatory action: bank overdraft fees. And those fees are not distributed the proverbial 80/20 pattern, with 20% of the accounts contributing 80% of the activity, but 90/10. And that 10%, not surprisingly, is in consumers with the lowest credit scores. And the biggest banks are the ones […]
Read more...Ahem, the story from The Hill on the ever rising tide of Federal budget deficits lists financial firm bailouts first as causes of the red ink, with falling tax receipts second. And the very same bailout recipients are crowing about their profitability. Now admittedly, the biggest contributors to the July increase were Fannie and Freddie, […]
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