Is Wells Fargo a Lehman in the Making?
Banking maven Chris Whalen has a must-read piece on the reckless real estate risk taking underway at Wells Fargo, the sanctimonious #4 bank.
Read more...Category Archives: Banking industry
Philip Pilkington: Bankers Shoot Selves in Foot – “Reduce Our Profits by Cutting Deficits, Please!”
By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil
Are governments really engaging in ‘financial repression’?
Read more...The Renegade Economist Speaks with Ann Pettifor
This is the sort of talk that makes Americans jealous of the British. Heterodox economist Ann Pettifor predicted a global debt deflation in 2003 (!) and critiques conventional thinking in the economics discipline. She also has a wonderfully theatrical manner of speaking.
Read more...Dan Kervick: The Astonishing Case of the Impenetrable Zero Bound
Yves here. I rather like the storytelling format of this post.
By Dan Kervick, who does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
In a small, peaceful town there once lived three people: Abbie, Baker and Carlie.
Read more...Charlotte to Suspend Constitutional Free Speech and Assembly Protections to Help Bank of America, Duke Shareholder Meetings
It has become pretty routine for local police to engage in thuggery and run roughshod over Constitutional protections in the name of maintaining order, which increasingly means not annoying big companies.
Read more...Big Employers Extorting States, Pocketing Employee Income Tax Withholding
Wonder why states are broke? It isn’t just the global financial crisis induced knock-on effects of a plunge in tax receipts and a rise in social safety net payments. Nor is it just pension fund time bombs (note that despite the press hysteria, the problem is unmanageable only in a comparatively small number of states, with New Jersey way out in front, thanks to 15 years of the state stealing from the workers’ kitty, plus a decision to take big risk at exactly the wrong moment, in 2007, which resulted in large losses). A significant unrecognized culprit is companies managing to divert tax revenue from stressed states to their coffers.
Read more...Occupy Wall Street Sues New York City, JP Morgan #OWS
One of the continuing and largely unrecognized aspects of the ongoing media coverage of Occupy Wall Street is that police brutality and lesser abuses have been airbrushed out.
Read more...Morgan Sandquist: Finance in Denial – Conclusion
This is the last part in a four-part essay by Morgan Sandquist, a member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group. The previous post are In Denial, The Addiction, and An Intervention. Cross posted from mathbabe
Still sitting in our breakfast nook, with the banking industry squinting grumpily back at us through the glare of the morning sun on the perfectly polished granite table top, we can sit back, rest our hands on the table, and rather than shouting what it expects to hear, playing our part in the script of codependency, we can speak, without pleading or rancor, the truths that are beyond the script.
Satyajit Das: The European Debt Crisis Redux
By Satyajit Das, derivatives expert and the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2006 and 2010). Jointly posted with Roubini Global Economics
The half-life of solutions to Europe’s debt problem is getting ever shorter.
Recent hopes have relied on the ostensible success of the European Central Bank’s (“ECB”) LTRO – Long Term Refinancing Operation, more appropriately termed the Lourdes Treatment and Resuscitation Option.
Read more...Marshall Auerback: Spain is the New Greece
By Marshall Auerback, a hedge fund manager and portfolio strategist. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
Spain has become the new Greece. Actually, in many respects Spain is now worse than Greece.
Read more...Morgan Sandquist: Finance in Denial – An Intervention
This is the third part in a four-part essay by Morgan Sandquist, a member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group. The previous post are In Denial and The Addiction. Cross posted from mathbabe
What are we to do with our banking industry, sitting there at the kitchen table in its underwear, drumming on the table with one hand and scratching its increasingly coarse chin with the other in an impossibly syncopated rhythm, letting fly a dizzying stream of assurances, justifications, and accusations, and generally spoiling for a fight that can only be avoided by complete and enthusiastic agreement with a narrative that can be very difficult to follow, let alone make sense of?
Read more...Memo to Schneiderman Mortgage Task Force: When You are in a Hole, Quit Digging
The much ballyhooed mortgage task force seems to be hewing to the Obama play book of believing that any problem can be solved with better propaganda.
Read more...Morgan Sandquist: Finance in Denial – The Addiction
By Morgan Sandquist, a member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group. Cross posted from mathbabe
Is it fair to say that because the quality of the denial surrounding the banking industry’s problems is so similar to that of the denial surrounding addiction, that addiction is therefore the root of those problems and our ongoing failure to adequately address them? Perhaps not, but others have come to describe money, debt, and banking as something very much like addiction for entirely different, and far better argued, reasons.
Read more...Reining in Finance and the Effort to Silence a Critical UN Agency
This Real News Network segment gives a window into the efforts to squash criticism of the neoliberal orthodoxy in the world of international agencies. Even though the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) gets very little attention in the major media, its well researched and often prescient reports are enough of a threat to the orthodoxy to produce efforts by the advanced economy block in the UN to try to clip the wings of the agency. The start of this interview may seem like a bit of inside baseball, but it shortly gets to issues that are critically important.
Read more...Morgan Sandquist: Finance in Denial
By Morgan Sandquist, a member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group. Cross posted from mathbabe
The largest banks in America–Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and others–are probably insolvent.
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