This post first appeared on February 22, 2008 Man, not only does the Administration tell whoppers, but it is completely shameless about them. The latest sighting comes from Reuters: Treasury Undersecretary Robert Steel told the Reuters Housing Summit it is proper for homeownership to hold a special status…. “If I default on my credit card […]
Read more...It’s often the travail of a blogger, and small media generally, to have its story picked up by bigger fry without acknowledgment. But it’s one thing when a writer suspects having made a contribution to another’s story (there is, after all, the possibility of parallel inquiries bearing fruit on different timetables); quite another to have […]
Read more...A few days ago, we noted: When an economy is very slack, cheaper money is not going to induce much in the way of real economy activity. Unless you are a financial firm, the level of interest rates is a secondary or tertiary consideration in your decision to borrow. You will be interested in borrowing […]
Read more...There’s been an interesting dialogue between Streetwise Professor and Deus ex Macchiato on the matter of the practical impact of the pending Basel III rules, which will rejigger, in a pretty significant way, bank capital requirements (see here and here for details). The reason Basel III matters is that the Treasury has been touting it […]
Read more...This post first appeared on November 16, 2007 A colleague was so kind as to send me the text of a speech given at the Graham & Dodd breakfast a few weeks ago by David Einhorn, CEO of hedge fund Greenlight Capital. The speech has gotten play only in some personal-investment-oriented blogs like Seeking Alpha […]
Read more...The Jackson Hole conference starting today is expected to include a talk by Ben Bernanke on the benefits and costs of further monetary easing, which in ZIRP-land means quantitative easing. Gavyn Davies put up a good short list of arguments made against QE at the Financial Times, and most do not look terribly persuasive. One […]
Read more...The very minute the Paul Volcker, who proposed the sound idea that government backstopped banks not engage in proprietary trading, said that trades done on behalf of customers were meant to be excluded from this proposal, anyone familiar with trading could see he’d just deep sixed his idea. Proprietary trading existed LONG before banks decided […]
Read more...By Satyajit Das, a risk consultant and author of Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2010, FT-Prentice Hall). Anatole Kaletsky (2010) Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis; Public Affairs, New York In their song Lola, Ray Davies and […]
Read more...I think we all know the answer to the question in the headline, courtesy F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The rich are different than you and me.” And the fact that they have more money means their defaults are couched as pure business decisions. But mere homeowners, told to view their house as an investment, are now […]
Read more...Boy, when you think you’ve seen the worst in utterly shameless, self serving tripe, someone manages to outdo it. Admittedly, it’s awfully hard to beat Steve Schwarzmann’s recent one-two punch of utter canard wrapped in tasteless hyperbole, that of Obama proposals that private equity kingpins pay taxes on what is really the fruits of their […]
Read more...This post first appeared on November 10, 2007 The equity markets seem to have finally realized that conditions are ugly in the credit markets, due to get uglier, and the mess will pull down the real economy. And the bad news continues. The dollar index fell to a new low. Wachovia said the value of […]
Read more...Yves here. We were skeptical of derivatives reform efforts as inadequate to deal with the product that needed to be reined in, credit default swaps, and subject to evisceration depending on how various details were sorted out. And if the types of contracts that wind up being covered are reasonably broad, the new derivatives clearinghouse […]
Read more...The banks giveth and the banks taketh away, big time. This chart from a Wall Street Journal article on credit card interest rates says a great deal: Even though banks are getting all kinds of bennies from the Fed and regulators, such as a nice steep yield curve and lots of regulatory forbearance (econ-speak for […]
Read more...New York Times writer Louise Story recaps a bold thesis put forward by David Moss of Harvard Business School, namely, that high levels of income inequality stoke financial crises: The possible connection between economic inequality and financial crises came to Mr. Moss about a year ago… A colleague suggested that he overlay two different graphs […]
Read more...This post first appeared on September 21, 2007 In an intriguing article today, “The Bank loses a game of chicken,” Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ chief economics writer, followed the lead of the Bank of England’s Governor Mervyn King in backing down from their shared view that central bankers should be willing to let all […]
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