This post first appeared on February 18, 2007 Mirable dictu, a Wall Street Journal editorial, “How Expansions Die,” that, for the most part, has a solid foundation in reality. Although the WSJ’s news pages have been reporting on the meltdown in the subprime mortgage market (admittedly somewhat less intently than the Financial Times), both the […]
Read more...Back to this thing to try to work out what it’s driving at. Yves wrote: I have serious trouble with its bottom line: We document that the shadow banking system became severely strained during the financial crisis because, like traditional banks, shadow banks conduct credit, maturity, and liquidity transformation, but unlike traditional financial intermediaries, they […]
Read more...Can any of you shed light on these reader questions about tax havens? The US tolerance for tax havens is puzzling, given that the US taxes citizens on their income earned anywhere in the world, and takes a dim view of foreign bank accounts (I am under the impression the rules have been tightened even […]
Read more...To say there is no love lost between Treasury and Elizabeth Warren is probably putting it mildly. Treasury was gunning for her ouster in early 2009; I heard multiple accounts both of how concerted the Administration opposition to her was (recall she was actually chosen as head of the Congressional Oversight Panel before the regime […]
Read more...By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive and Yves Smith A common fallacy is to assume that situations are polar: win/lose, black/white, hot/cold, heads/tails. But more often, given A, “not A” is not the opposite of A. Conventional wisdom in the financial media is that the settlement announced by the SEC over its […]
Read more...Goldman’s stock was trading at $140.15 at 3:26 PM today. It moved more than 4 points in the next ten minutes. I got wind that the settlement announcement was set for 4:45 PM at around 4:00 PM. I pinged a journalist at a major financial media outlet to find out whether there had been an […]
Read more...Simon Johnson deserves tons of kudos for pointing out that the US is in the hands of financial oligarchs, via his celebrated Atlantic article, “The Quiet Coup.” But having recognized a clear and present danger, he seems peculiarly willing to confuse non-solutions with meaningful measures. In an article at Project Syndicate, he incorrectly celebrates a […]
Read more...RealtyTrac, as reported on Housing Wire, gave a gloomy update on the US housing market. RealtyTrac does granular collection of data on foreclosures, capturing every filing. One of the shortcomings of this approach is that processes vary by state (as in some state require more court filings over the course of a foreclosure than others). […]
Read more...If you have any doubts about how easy it is for someone who works hard in the US to get ahead, consider this factoid from Martin Wolf’s latest comment in the Financial Times, on Raghuram Rajan’s new book (see Satyajit Das’ review here: Thus, Prof Rajan notes that “of every dollar of real income growth […]
Read more...A well placed Washington contact wrote: I was in a discussion with the staff at one of the Federal agencies involved in housing to ask them about the new policies on strategic defaults. It became clear almost immediately that regulators obviously have no idea how to identify strategic defaulters except by asking big banks. They […]
Read more...Satyajit Das is too shrewd to call the European Financial Stability Facility, informally described as a €440 billion sovereign bailout fund, a mere sleight of hand. But it’s hard not to draw that conclusion after reading his Financial Times comment today. Central banks and governments have developed an alarming fondness for the very sort of […]
Read more...When I was in the UK earlier this year, I saw a very senior financial regulator speak. In the Q&A session, someone asked him to comment on US financial reform. His reply was tantamount to “Wake me when it’s over,” and it was clear his expectations were low. One source of frustration is that the […]
Read more...Der Spiegel (hat tip reader Richard Smith) presents a detailed sketch of German thinking, specifically that of chancellor Angela Merkel and finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, regarding how countries who fail an initial round of restructuring within the eurozone would be treated. This piece is very much worth reading, but the German proposal has all the […]
Read more...By Wallace C. Turbeville, the former CEO of VMAC LLC and a former Vice President of Goldman, Sachs & Co. who writes at New Deal 2.0 William D. Cohan’s op-ed piece in the July 7th New York Times had the same title as this article, but for the word “Don’t.” At first glance, I thought […]
Read more...I sometimes wonder whether Wolfgang Munchau of the Financial Times and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph channel each other. Although they are both dubious of the eurozone’s ability to navigate its way out of its current mess, they also have an interesting habit of taking up similar issues on the same publication date. Today, both […]
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