Even though I have read a number of accounts of the horrorshow of Jefferson County’s sewer financing fiasco, every time I go through a new one that it reasonably detailed, it still instills the same sense of rage. Rage not simply at the pervasive corruption – that’s bad enough – but that this predatory style […]
Read more...One has to wonder whether anyone in a position of influence really believes what he is selling. At best, Jamie Dimon’s defense of too big to fail banks like his own JP Morgan is a vivid illustration of Upton Sinclair’s saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends […]
Read more...Rolfe Winkler has an useful sighting on a wrinkle in the Ambac receivership. A big bone of contention has been the credit default swaps that Ambac wrote on various structured credit transactions. While many of the contracts provided for considerably delayed payment (they were different in this regard from AIG’s CDS), as Ambac’s condition worsened, […]
Read more...Independent Strategy’s latest report, “China’s credit bubble: the missing piece in the jigsaw” makes a persuasive case that China’s debt fueled growth model is due for a hard landing, but the timing is uncertain, since the debt is funded internally. China is barely past an episode of dealing with banks chock full of bad loans […]
Read more...Enjoy! Below is a related discussion by Ann Rutledge of R&R Consulting, another structured credit expert:
Read more...Rampant fraud in the mortgage industry has increased so sharply that the FBI warned Friday of an "epidemic" of financial crimes which, if not curtailed, could become "the next S&L crisis." Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker said the booming mortgage market, fueled by low interest rates and soaring home values, has attracted unscrupulous professionals and […]
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. Wide swaths of families, businesses, investors, taxpayers, and others have had not just their net worth but their lives […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist and Rob Parenteau, CFA, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge, editor of The Richebacher Letter, and a research associate of The Levy Economics Institute Who funds our budget deficit? It is a question taking on increasing significance, given the recent back up on longer-dated bond yields, which […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. Arthur Conan Doyle’s literary creation, Sherlock Holmes, once solved a murder by noting the dog that didn’t bark. It doesn’t take Holmes’s ingenuity to see that the plan on offer for Greece is clearly a rescue package which doesn’t rescue. […]
Read more...By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive Felix Salmon at Reuters and Steve Gandel at Curious Capitalist used some of the analysis in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short as an opportunity to attempt to exonerate Goldman Sachs for the charge of deliberately constructing CDOs to go bad for their own profit. In particular, […]
Read more...The EU seems unintimidated by various threats the hedge fund and private equity fund industry have tried to make to forestall efforts to restrict the activities of those firms. The EU proposed both limiting the ability of EU nationals to invest in non-EU funds, and the ability of non-EU players to operate within the EU. […]
Read more...Get this: insurance companies have long been very big institutional investors. They get cash from premiums and have to pay it out in the future. If they are in the property and casualty or health insurance business, there isn’t that long a time between premium payments and when the losses might show up, but other […]
Read more...Now it is getting closer to being official. This Bloomberg story reports that not only do Wall Street firms screw their clients (hardly a novel revelation these days) but a large group of firms allegedly conspired to price-fix on guarantee investment contracts, a product used by government issuers to park cash raised via bond issues […]
Read more...Economists are often in the “it works in practice, but does it work in theory?” mode, but here we see a case where some are grappling with why some of their prized notions pre-crisis came a cropper. A clever post at VoxEU discusses why financial innovation isn’t what it is cracked up to be, and […]
Read more...While we have enjoyed a period of relative calm after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the improvement in economic conditions exists in parallel with growing geopolitical tensions. None of the causes of the crisis have been resolved. We still have global imbalances. We still have powerful, predatory, and unconstrained capital markets players firmly in control of […]
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