Category Archives: Banking industry

Ilargi: The Illusionary Economy Revives Helocs, the Home ATM

Yves here. Ilargi is duly skeptical of the enthusiastic financial press response to an increase in home equity liquidation, um, borrowing using home equity lines of credit, or Helocs. While the party line is that this development reflects an rise in home equity and increased consumer confidence, Ilargi stresses that prices appreciation that the Fed has created, the Fed can also take away. I have to wonder how many of these Heloc borrowers are doing so out of necessity or near-desperation.

Bill Black: OCC as Case Study of How Regulators Decide to Fail

Yves here. I’m highlighting this post for a basic reason: there’s a lot of cynicism about regulation. Many Americans have bought the right-wing line that regulations can’t work. But here, whether by accident or design, a reform program at a key bank regulator, the OCC, is going off the rails due to bad strategic choices.

Don Quijones: The Bank That Nobody Wants To Buy

The sorry tale of the supposedly restored Spanish zombie bank Catalunya Caixa.

Credit Suisse’s Guilty Plea: The WSJ Uses the Right Adjective to Modify the Wrong Noun

Yves here. I generally avoid Wall Street Journal editorials because they are designed to make readers stupider (op eds are a different matter, some decent pieces get published). Bill Black does yeoman’s work in deconstructing the Journal’s attempt to depict Credit Suisse as a victim of Department of Justice overreach.

R. Hunter Biden Should Declare Who Really Owns His New Ukrainian Employer, Burisma Holdings

Trying to pierce the murk around the new Ukrainian venture of Vice President Biden’s son R. Hunter Biden

Wolf Richter: This Chart Is The Fate of Housing In America As Student Loans Bankrupt A Whole Generation

Student loans are a millstone that is crushing college educated young adults, and with them, key parts of the economy.

DoJ Does Victory Lap on Credit Suisse Guilty Plea on Single Criminal Charge

The Department of Justice wants the public to see the guilty plea it obtained from Credit Suisse as a Big Deal. Is it?

A Whistleblower’s Tainted Defeat: CA Appellate Reversal Paves Way for Continued Bank Retaliation

How an appellate court ran roughshod over bedrock principles of judicial review to reverse a decisive victory by a Countrywide whistleblower.

New Zealand: the Shell Company Incorporation Franchises (III)

We remind the New Zealand government that a shell company network linked to $10-100Bn of alleged moneylaundering is still active in New Zealand.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, Timothy Geithner, and the Three Card Monte Model of Propaganda

Truth be told, I had really wanted to ignore Andrew Ross Sorkin’s artfully packaged Timothy Geithner puff piece in the Sunday New York Times magazine. But it makes for a useful study in a not-well-recognized propaganda technique, three card monte.

Has America’s Use of Finance as a Foreign Policy Tool Backfired?

How America’ s abject fealty to the financial services industry, and its promotion of open capital markets in emerging economies, privatization and its tolerance of tax havens, have destroyed US credibility in Eastern Europe.

Why QE May Have Done Net Damage

Quantitative easing has been a controversial policy even among the financiers who benefitted from it.

No Evidence Justice Department Will Prosecute U.S. Banks Responsible for Financial Crisis

Bill Black is in particularly fine form in this Real News Network video.

Ilargi: A Stampede of Elephants in the China Shop

On the danger that China’s overgrown shadow banking system poses to the economy, and the practical and political obstacles to curbing it.

Yanis Varoufakis: Europe’s Slide into Deflation, and What to do About It

By Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his website. From an interview for Jornal de Negócios by Jorge N. Rodrigues Europe is in the clasp of the deflationary forces that resulted directly from its inane handling of the Eurozone crisis. In this interview, I discuss deflation and […]