It is increasingly evident that the appointment of Elizabeth Warren to act as special advisor to the President and Treasury for the newly-established Consumer Financial Protection Agency has everything to do with Obama trying to shore up his questionable credentials as a reformer and perilous little with helping ordinary citizens. So the only question that […]
Read more...Another ticking time bomb in the realm of real estate bad behavior is bound to go off sooner rather than later, and it is likely to impede normalization of values of residential property. As readers no doubt know, there is a lot of actual and shadow residential real estate inventory in the US. The time […]
Read more...The London sponsored bike hire scheme provides an ongoing media opportunity for one of the UK’s less well liked banks. Not everyone thinks the PR should go unchallenged. Shot in Smithfield yesterday, hat tip Richard Smith:
Read more...The body language of the Administration has been clear from the outset on the question of whether Elizabeth Warren would get its nomination to head of the new financial services consumer protection agency. Despite the occasional public remark regarding her undeniable competence, which really amounted to damning her with faint praise, Team Obama has never […]
Read more...It may seem perverse to use a particularly strong piece by Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, who even on his rare less than stellar days is reasoned and readable, to illustrate a deep rooted problem even for critical thinkers in the mainstream media, namely, that certain ways of framing issues are simply off limits. […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio analyst, hedge fund manager, and Roosevelt Institute fellow There’s a good reason why the Troubled Asset Relief Program (aka “TARP”) is “a success none dare mention”, to use the title of Ben Smith’s latest post at Politico. Put simply, it’s not a success. Calling the TARP a success is like […]
Read more...Arriving at the rush, with extra impetus doubtless imparted by the recent and ongoing Eurobanking panic, we have the Basel III capital and liquidity reforms (there’s a one pager, a full press release and, oh, not wholly unexpectedly, a somewhat anticlimactic phase-in timetable). In fact, the liquidity reforms here are just timetable entries – the […]
Read more...By Andrew Horowitz who writes at The Disciplined Investor It is Monday and we know that means either Merger Monday, Mutual Fund Monday or even Magical Monday . Well, it was surely a big volume morning as most traders are back to their desks. As China released their production numbers along with CPI, Asian markets […]
Read more...With the fullness of time, housing prices are due to revert to something approximating the mean of their historical relationship to rental prices and incomes, albeit with an overshoot probable. But how quickly we reach that level will be very much a function of how quickly foreclosures take place and real estate is disposed of. […]
Read more...Once a Cassandra, always a Cassandra? That seems to be William White’s fate. White, the former chief economist of the Bank of International Settlements, is best known for his warnings in 2003 that many advanced economies were in the grip of housing bubbles, which Greenspan pointedly ignored. Although he is now celebrated for that call, […]
Read more...This post first appeared on April 10, 2008 Floyd Norris of the New York Times, in an otherwise fine piece, “It’s a Crisis, And Ideas Are Scarce” has a paragraph that set my teeth on edge. But let’s deal with the parts that have merit first, and hold the rant in abeyance. Norris uses the […]
Read more...This post first appeared on April 8, 2008 While there have been dark mutterings about how Bear shareholders were cheated in the sale of the firm to JP Morgan, I don’t have much sympathy for that view. Plenty of businesses fail every day; equity investors usually lose their entire stake and employees are fired. While […]
Read more...This is a great interview of Tom Ferguson on Real News Network on the consequences of the “head’s I win, tails you lose” the financial sector has constructed with the rest of us, with Baltimore as object lesson. Enjy!
Read more...A little shock for the Germans while we’re at it, with resonances for the whole Eurozone. From FT Deutschland: The chief economist of the European Central Bank (ECB), Juergen Stark, considers the German banks to be undercapitalized. Stark made this statement on Wednesday at a meeting with the head of Unions Parliamentary Group in Berlin, […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston recently published a paper titled: “Reasonable People Could Disagree: Optimism and Pessimism About […]
Read more...