Your humble blogger is in no position to speculate how this curious set of circumstances came about, but we have a good news, bad news situation, and hope readers can help remedy the bad news part.
Read more...The private equity firm Mortgage Resolution Partners looks to be well on its way to getting the good uses of eminent domain torpedoed by getting some not-too-swift municipalities to sign up for its self-serving scheme. One indicator of how dubious the MPR program is that investors who have been complacent in the face of all sorts of abuses by originators and servicers, have roused themselves to act in a unified manner and push back against the MRP plan, in the form of a suit filed in Federal court in California on Wednesday.
Read more...The Eurozone’s debt crisis is getting worse despite appearances to the contrary. How can we end it? This column presents five major options for reducing crisis countries’ debt. Looking into the details, it seems the only option that is both realistic and effective is for countries to default by selling monetised debt to the ECB. Moral hazard aside, burying the debt seems to be the only way we can end the crisis.
Read more...We’ve been pointing out for some time that Germany has refused to budge from wanting contradictory things relative to the Eurozone. Now something still has to break, but some of my correspondents who’ve just been in Europe now think that we will see a political crisis in Europe before we see an economic one, and that, like objects in your rear view mirror, may be closer than it appears.
Read more...Yves here. It may seem like a “dog bites man” account to describe yet again how traders are fixated on their bonuses, often have tawdry personal habits (cocaine, whores, flashy cars) and have no compunction about leaving rubble in their wake, be it customers or the firms for which they work.
However, it’s one thing to hear it from outsiders or people who’ve managed to spend some time on a dealing room floor, and another to have someone in the industry describe what goes on.
Read more...Jessica Silver-Greenberg at the New York Times has an important account of how a system created by banks to catch scam artists like check-kiters has morphed over 20 years into a shadow credit reporting system.
Read more...Data out of Europe is showing relative improvement on several important fronts, but is this merely stabilization or “less bad” as opposed to finally turning a corner?
Read more...If we go by the rumors circulating in the financial press, the Obama Administration is on the verge of selecting a proven failure – Lawrence Summers – to be the next Chair of the Federal Reserve System. We can, and need to, do a lot better than that.
Read more...Whatever happened to innovation in America?
Read more...Yves here. The post below from Paul Buchheit makes a persuasive layperson’s case for a financial transactions tax. There is an equally sound case to be made from a financial markets viewpoint.
Read more...Yves here. Varoufakis performs the important service of translating what is effectively a formal communication from Germany on its stance towards subject states, meaning the Eurozone periphery.
Read more...Yves here. Aside from the foursquare case that Professor Black makes for reinstituting Glass-Steagall, another important set of arguments came in 2009 from Andrew Haldane, director of financial stability at the Bank of England.
Read more...What sexual favors were exchanged so that the New York Times blunted the impact of an important, detailed investigative story on Goldman profiteering, this time in the aluminum market, by releasing it on a heat-addled summer Saturday?
Read more...The Chinese government, as has been widely reported, is trying to cool growth, in large measure to take the hot air out of its shadow banking sector. But can it engineer its hoped-for soft landing?
Read more...Spitzer is the only major U.S. politician whose deeds, and not simply words, prove that he does not think corporate titans are too big to jail. And as New York City Comptroller, he’d have subpoena power.
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