Coming to a Broke Municipality Near You: The Greek, Um, Jefferson County, Solution
Jefferson County’s sewer system train wreck is now looking an awful lot like the periphery country in Europe mess.
Read more...Category Archives: Banking industry
Is the Fed Going to Dial Down Its QE Taper Talk?
We’ve suggested that the Fed has drunken a bit too much of its own confidence Kool-Aid to be talking about tapering QE. The problem now, as we’ve stressed, is that the effect of QE may prove to be asymmetrical.
Read more...Obama Axes Bank-Harrassing Gary Gensler at CFTC, Plans to Install Lightweight Ex-Goldmanite
Obama is no longer bothering to pretend that he is anything other than a stooge for banks and other big money interests.
Read more...Mary Jo White Institutionalizes Deutsche Bank Protection Racket at the SEC
The Financial Times has caught a significant revolving door that its business press peers have largely overlooked.
Read more...Mortgage Delinquencies Down….But a Record 843 Days to Foreclose
Yves here. While most investors and analysts were busy fixating on the Fed’s taper and the unemployment report and the Abenomics roller coaster, some important housing market news slipped under the radar.
Read more...Sheila Bair: Everything the IMF Wanted to Know About Financial Regulation and Wasn’t Afraid to Ask
Does anybody have a clear vision of the desirable financial system of the future?
Read more...Mr. Market’s Temper Tantrum Over Fed Tapering Talk
Lordie, the market upset we’ve had over the past week plus over Bernanke using the T, as in “tapering” word, is escalating into a full-blown hissy fit. We now have the Wall Street Journal and other finance-oriented venues telling us how unbelievably important today’s job report is. Huh? One jobs report is just another in a long series of data points.
So why has this one been assigned earth-shaking importance?
Read more...Quelle Surprise! US and UK to File Criminal Charges Against Small Fry for Barclay’s Libor Abuses
Now before anyone gets excited about the specter of bankers doing a perp walk, the early word in a Wall Street Journal story on criminal charges being readied against former Barclays bankers says that the prosecutions will target “midlevel traders.” This exercise thus continues the established pattern of small fry serving as human shields for managers and executives.
Read more...Mortgage Rate Increases Starting to Bite
Bloomberg reports that that staple of mortgage funding, the 30 year fixed rate mortgage, has seen its interest rate increase from 3.48% a month ago to 4.16% as of yesterday. By contrast, the highest rate the 30 year mortgage reached in the previous year as of mid-March had been 3.85%.
One analyst, Mark Hanson, sees evidence that the dropoff in refinancings has been impressive
Read more...Dan Kervick: Do Banks Create Money from Thin Air?
Yves here. This post by Kervick is LONG, but that’s because he unpacks the “creation” of money in a step-by-step manner. Your patience will be rewarded.
Read more...Bill Black: How Elite Economic Hucksters Drive America’s Biggest Fraud Epidemics
Bill Black describes the spurious efforts to justify America’s recent fraudfests.
Read more...The Stealth Problem of Predatory Mortgage Modifications
Warning: mortgage modifications can be yet another exercise in bank predation.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Mixed Messages from the IMF
Yves here. Note how the need to pretend Deutsche Bank is not undercapitalized, mentioned in passing in this post, is playing into policy.
An interview by Yanis Varoufakis, Professor of Economics at the University of Athens, with Tomas Hirst of Pieria. Cross posted from Yanis Varoufakis’ blog.
Read more...Sasha Breger: How Big Finance is Eating the World’s Lunch Agricultural Wealth
If you hear a kind of whooshing, rushing noise, don’t worry—it’s not US jobs moving to China. Today’s great sucking sound is the sound of agricultural wealth being siphoned off into the global financial system.
Read more...Bill Black: How Dare DOJ Insult HSBC’s Crooks as Less “Professional” than Liberty Reserve’s Crooks?
By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Standard Chartered and HSBC’s leaders must be doubly humiliated by the description by Mythili Raman, the acting head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Criminal Division, of Liberty Reserve’s money laundering operation. UK laws are, of course, very congenial to those suing for libel and I am sure that these banking titans are meeting with their solicitors to demand a retraction and apology from Raman.
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