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.
Read more...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.
Read more...Trying to pierce the murk around the new Ukrainian venture of Vice President Biden’s son R. Hunter Biden
Read more...Student loans are a millstone that is crushing college educated young adults, and with them, key parts of the economy.
Read more...The Department of Justice wants the public to see the guilty plea it obtained from Credit Suisse as a Big Deal. Is it?
Read more...How an appellate court ran roughshod over bedrock principles of judicial review to reverse a decisive victory by a Countrywide whistleblower.
Read more...We remind the New Zealand government that a shell company network linked to $10-100Bn of alleged moneylaundering is still active in New Zealand.
Read more...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.
Read more...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.
Read more...