Economist Ann Pettifor discusses how economies around the world moved from using borrowing to support productive investments to fueling speculation and consumption, and how that led to the financial crisis. She also describes how the post-crisis response to the debt overhang isn’t merely ineffective but in fact counterproductive.
Read more...Yves here. It’s become tough work keeping up with the continuing large gap between Dimon hagiography in the media and his dubious accomplishments. So hat’s off to Bill Black for staying on this beat.
Read more...China faces the first big test of its shadow banking system, in the form of a pending default. How is it likely to fare?
Read more...San Francisco may be extreme, but housing bubbles are now re-cropping up across the nation – and so are the very factors that helped inflate the prior housing bubble and then magnified the ferociousness of its implosion.
Read more...So now we know why the Republicans have been going to such extreme lengths to try to preserve embattled New Jersey governor Chris Christie as a national figure…
Read more...I very much enjoyed this chat on why banker are able to extract such extortionate pay so much and hope you do as well (as in the talk, not the underlying fact set).
Read more...You know it’s bad when Bloomberg’s editors attack the banks’ win against regulators, in this case, their success in watering down already-too-generous Basel III capital requirements. And they look primed to score a twofer on pending rulemaking on trading in physical commodities.
Read more...Readers may recall that banks, in their eagerness to depict the final Volcker rule as a terrible miscarriage of justice, made a great deal of noise about the case of Zions Bank, which was blaming $378 million of prospective losses on the Volcker-rule requirement that banks sell these dubious instruments called TruPS CDOs by July 21, 2015. The regulators clarified the relevant rules, which looks like a concession. But how much of a concession is it?
Read more...An article in the Financial Times by Tracy Alloway gives yet another sighting that bond investors are getting a bit frantic in their hunt for yield. The piece has the eyepopping title, Yield-hungry investors snap up US homeless bond. It uses recent deals in the CMBS (commercial mortgage backed securities) market as a proxy for bond investors’ QE-driven hunt for more return.
Read more...Occasionally, we’ve commented on the shoddy state of US credit card payment infrastructure. One of the noteworthy aspects of the fiasco of recent US retailer security breaches is that the media has more or less ignored the question of what could have been done to forestall these incidents, which in the case of Target involved as many as 70 million customers, and Neiman Marcus, under (but presumably not much under) 1 million.
Read more...I had fun on this interview…
Read more...George Soros has caused a bit of a frisson by calling China the greatest risk to the global economy. The Chinese shadow banks are the trouble spot to watch.
Read more...I’ve been going out of my mind the past few days seeing the easily duped traditional media uncritically printing statistical analysis from JPMorgan Chase’s roundelay of get-out-of-jail-almost-free settlements. The gist of it, and this must have been in a Department of Justice release somewhere, is that JPM has “paid” $20 billion over the last calendar year to resolve a variety of disputes, the most recent being their admission that they knew the bogus nature of Bernie Madoff’s business and never generated any suspicious activity reports or raised red flags for regulators (the fact that they took their money out of Madoff feeder funds right before he was arrested being a smoking gun)… $20 billion is a FAKE NUMBER.
Read more...Yves here. I don’t know whether to be relieved or annoyed to see Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff retreat from their pro-austerity stance and endorse debt restructuring, since their prior view (that budget-cutting was necessary and productive) served to justify considerable and unnecessary pain being inflicted on periphery Eurozone countries to preserve the illusion of health of French and German banks.
But as Yanis Varoufakis points out, although Reinhart and Rogoff are retreating from much of their erroneous thinking, they haven’t renounced all of it.
Read more...Yves here. This is a nice piece of crisis-related forensic work. Too bad we’ve seen so little of this sort of thing.
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