You have to give former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan credit for having no shame. Well, he did once look a bit rattled before Congress for about five minutes and ‘fessed up it never occurred to him that people would be so greedy as to pull so much cash out of companies so as to leave […]
Read more...Elizabeth Warren, head of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the TARP, has been a vocal advocate for the need for a financial product safety commission. The notion, which seemed quixotic a few weeks ago, is getting consideration by the Obama Administration. Given how industry friendly Team Obama’s financial services industry measures have been, it runs […]
Read more...Elizabeth Warren is facing the peculiar experience of being Mr. Smith in Washington. I am a big fan of her position and message, and have come to notice that (not surprisingly) the posture of her interviewer makes a great difference in how well she comes off. Bill Maher pitched a bunch of softballs, and Warren […]
Read more...Submitted by Rolfe Winkler of OptionARMageddon Reader Note: Last fall, I published a detailed (recent) history of BankUnited in the pages of Housing Wire Magazine. With the bank’s future likely to be settled over the next week, I thought NC readers might appreciate a look at the piece. Thanks to HW’s Paul Jackson for allowing […]
Read more...The TARP elicited a firestorm of criticism at its inception, and at various points of its short existence, particularly the repeated injections into “too big to fail” Citigroup and Bank of America, plus the charade of Paulson forcing TARP funds onto banks who were eager to take them once the terms were revealed. Now, however, […]
Read more...Before anyone gets hysterical, the focus of the efforts by Team Obama on financial services industry pay appears to be to force the industry to stop rewarding undue risk taking. As much as I have been critical of many Administration plans, this, at least in concept, is a good one. Why? Because I sincerely doubt […]
Read more...Alan Greenspan tells us today that he sees signs of the housing market bottoming. The Financial Times tells us that delinquencies are increasing in prime mortgages, which are even harder to modify than subprime. I am beginning to get tired of the new mortgage lingo, or rather, the slippage of old mortgage lingo. In the […]
Read more...So much for the green shoots theory, at least as far as an early Chinese recovery is concerned. From AFP (hat tip reader Michael): Chinese exports fell 22.6 percent in April from a year earlier in the sixth straight monthly decline, state media said Tuesday,… Exports from the world’s third-largest economy totalled 91.94 billion dollars […]
Read more...Submitted by Rolfe Winkler, publisher of OptionARMageddon Much has been said here and elsewhere about the stress test’s lack of credibility, especially after word emerged about “intense bargaining”over the results. Not to belabor the point, but some data may be of use. Of the more promising developments early in the process, the Fed articulated the […]
Read more...This post is from reader Gonzalo Lira. Although I beg to differ with him on a couple of his observations, it’s certainly colorful and thought provoking. I give my quibbles at the end. Insofar as this burgeoning Millennial Depression goes, I’ve noticed there are two sorts of people: Ones such as myself, obsessively following every […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of the site Credit Writedowns. Now that the results of the stress tests have been revealed, I would like to share a post with you that I wrote on Credit Writedowns about two weeks ago. In this post, my operating assumption was that the stress tests were a grand charade. Summers […]
Read more...While I harbor considerable doubts about whether the idea of having a modern version of the so-called Pecora Hearings, the 1930 Senate Banking Committee sponsored probe of the financial services industry, will be as serious and as thorough as it needs to be. The fact that the Pecora initiative got as far as it did […]
Read more...We hate to keep harping, but more details of the stress test farce are coming to light. It was bad enough that the Treasury came up with an adverse case that is hardly a worse case scenario. As we pointed out, it is considerably more optimistic, both in duration and intensity of the downturn, than […]
Read more...As readers may know, secured lenders make loans against which specific assets are pledged. For consumers, mortgages and car loans are examples. If you default, the lender can seize the asset and sell it to try to recoup. In bankruptcy, secured lenders are normally the top of the food chain, but in the Chrysler bankruptcy, […]
Read more...The unduly charitable coverage of the stress tests continues. Even though the New York Times does raise a few questions, it still features industry preening and misses some of the important lapses: Industry executives reacted with jubilation, as if they had proved their critics wrong and passed the tests with flying colors. “The results off […]
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