Contrary to conventional wisdom in economics, a bigger role for finance, also known as “financial deepening,” has gone well beyond the point of maximum return. It is promoting more crises rather than more growth.
Read more...The document that Wikileaks exposed on Thursday is a portion of the financial services section. It is clearly designed to serve the pet interests of big international players. This agreement is designed to institutionalize the current level of deregulation as a baseline and facilitate the introduction of new products, further ease the movement of funds, data, and key personnel, and facilitate cross-border acquisitions and other forms of market entry.
Read more...Rob Johnson, political insider and executive director of INET, discusses the role of Big Finance in state and local budget woes.
Read more...Repeated foreclosure attempts against an on-time borrower reveal why servicing remains hopelessly broken. That also means government guaranteed mortgages are here to stay.
Read more...Now that homes are coming on the market in large numbers, buyers, faced with sky-high prices and higher mortgage rates, went on strike.
Read more...If central banks start pulling the rug out in the form of stopping, or even slowing down stimulus – heaven forfend they raise rates – it could be a rocky ride for the rest of the year for stocks.
Read more...Anat Admati, deemed by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the US, debunks the idea that the too-big-to-fail problem has been fixed. And she takes some swipes at Timothy Geithner.
Read more...In demanding tougher regulations, SEC commissioner Kara Stein is taking the unheard-of step of crossing swords with Mary Jo White, a chairman from the same party.
Read more...Yves here. It’s been astonishing to see members of the Fed in denial about their own handiwork, so when St. Louis Fed President James Bullard berates his fellow central bankers for their abject refusal to notice pre-crisis bubbles, it’s an all too rare departure from their usual insularity and willful blindness.
Read more...Larry Summers, like Tim Geithner, wants the public to believe that rescuing banks and leaving citizens to rot was the right crisis response. But neither experts, nor people who followed the crisis, nor voters at large are buying what Team Obama is trying to sell.
Read more...Russian companies are mounting a challenge to the dollar by seeking to arrange trade transactions in other currencies. But how serious a threat is it?
Read more...The ECB is expected to cross a Rubicon today by implementing negative deposit rates. What is the impact likely to be?
Read more...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.
Read more...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.
Read more...The sorry tale of the supposedly restored Spanish zombie bank Catalunya Caixa.
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