A news story today provides further confirmation of the rule by the banking classes in the US, with only token gestures to the rule of law. Per Bloomberg (hat tip Tom Adams), Citigroup is ponying up $75 million to settle SEC charges that the giant bank was not sufficiently forthcoming in the runup to the […]
Read more...Complementing today’s piece on the Chinese property bubble, a cross-post from VoxEU, with some graphical depictions of how wild the bubble has become. The NYT article referenced in the piece is here – RS. By Yongheng Deng, Professor of Real Estate and Finance at the National University of Singapore, Joseph Gyourko, Professor of Real Estate, […]
Read more...From Ed …the private sector in the west is in a higher savings and slower growth mode. The only way that the government can net save at the same time is via an increase in net exports to the emerging economies. The FT’s Geoff Dyer is right when he writes the “G20 looks to Beijing […]
Read more...Augmenting Ed’s recent links re Tom Adams, regular readers will remember Yves got a magazine cover and write-up in Calcalist. Now Tom Adams, another contributor to “Naked Capitalism”, (and ECONned helper, Magnetar sleuth, etc etc), has got a writeup by Calcalist. The main article is here, and it’s all in Hebrew, which Google Translate struggles […]
Read more...Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0 By Wallace C. Turbeville, the former CEO of VMAC LLC, and a former Vice President of Goldman, Sachs & Co. The current system of trader compensation will continue to decay the heart of Wall Street. Which is a greater threat to the nation — terrorism or the relentless decline of […]
Read more...Well, the Saturday hot spot forecast is panning out, patchily. The market is doing its own stress test calculations and coming up with radically different answers: JP Morgan thinks 54 banks fail their version of the tests. Barcap is picking at the funding mechanism that would be needed if there was ‘real’ stress, beyond that […]
Read more...Even if the rating agencies have retired hurt, it does seem that there is one organization still prepared to issue guarantees on, say, Option-ARM backed structured finance. Step forward, the collective of good old American taxpayers! One of my friendly emailers had a complete conniption about an FDIC program, during the week, and I never […]
Read more...Felix guessed how this Structured Finance issue pipeline would get sorted out, for the moment. Three not necessarily inconsistent takes on causes and effects: A neat way to embarrass the government. The rating agency logjam and the GM deal announced yesterday are closely related: if there’s one thing GM will think it still needs for […]
Read more...Richard covering for Yves here, in case that maritime internet connection, which seems OK for terse emails, is not so great for navigating 100 eurowebsites, to whizz through as much detail as possible. Just seven failures, making Chris Whalen’s EU stress tests: who knows, who cares? the main takeaway, I suppose. Not enough blood to […]
Read more...This post first appeared on March 27, 2007 This is a great post by Tanta at Calculated Risk on the classic types of mortgage frauds and how they morphed into new forms due to a unique confluence of buyer naivete and broker/originator greed (oh, and sometimes buyer greed too). She clearly discusses recent versus traditional […]
Read more...Tomorrow’s the big day. German overview, with scenarios on page 2. The D-Day metaphor is a waggish translation choice by the Englishers at “Der Spiegel” (the original has “Nervöse Finanzbranche”). Summaries of the results will be published at the CEBS, possibly at 18:00 CEST; which is 11:00 EST, if that helps some of you, but […]
Read more...Just a reminder of one little corner of the toxic debt fiasco that has plenty of bite still left in it. The Irish banks got in a big mess with duff RE loans. The government swapped discounted bad loans for government-issued bonds. A new agency, NAMA, monitors the duff loan portfolio. There are half a […]
Read more...Cross posted from The Economic Populist. By Garrett Johnson Most people think that the Wall Street bailouts ended at least a year ago. They would be wrong. (Reuters) – Increased housing commitments swelled U.S. taxpayers’ total support for the financial system by $700 billion in the past year to around $3.7 trillion, a government watchdog […]
Read more...This post first appeared on March 14, 2007 One of today’s lessons is to have greater courage in my convictions. In a number of earlier posts (such as “The Rising Tide of Liquidity,” part 2 and part 3 of the same, “Where Has the (Perception of) Risk Gone“) I pointed to how toppy the markets […]
Read more...A surprise for the ratings agencies, the bond market, and me, too – this has to be a late change in the Financial Reform bill, and it’s a corker. From the WSJ: The nation’s three dominant credit-ratings providers have made an urgent new request of their clients: Please don’t use our credit ratings. The odd […]
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