By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. Many market analysts, commentators and economists claim to be having a hard time finding a metric in which the US is in better financial shape than Greece. Ken Rogoff, for example, recently warned that a Greek default would usher in […]
Read more...It most certainly is ugly out there. Yesterday, CDS spreads gapped out on all sovereign risk trades, with dealers reporting that there was big protection buying any time spreads eased All risk aversion trades are back. The euro continues to fall versus the dollar, dropping from 130 to 125 in a mere 24 hours. The […]
Read more...This is a full length show with three other guests, with the topic actually being “who was to blame for the crisis, Washington or Wall Street?” I must confess, I didn’t use the obvious line: for the financial service industry’s backers to complain that lack of regulation caused the crisis is like someone who has […]
Read more...Investors continued their flight from risky assets as the wobbling Greek rescue looked ready to morph into a broader sovereign debt crisis, compounded by fears that a China’s expansion, once seen as inevitable and enduring, is now looking at risk of fading as the officialdom tries to dampen inflation. But the focus on the Greece […]
Read more...Would you believe the chairman of a financial firm who told you that he was going to be able to pay off his loans to you when: 1. The company was showing a not-negative net worth ONLY because it had marked down its loans on its accounting statements by 7.5%, even when the loan agreement […]
Read more...By Yves Smith and Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive The Fed and its friends and enablers in power, most recently Rahm Emanuel, are fighting tooth and nail to beat back the Audit the Fed amendments to pending financial reform legislation. That’s unfortunate and misguided. Even a cursory inspection of the Fed’s disclosures […]
Read more...Jill has substantial financial market experience (she started out in derivatives and later ran a $700 million fund) and it was a pleasure speaking to a knowledgeable interviewer. Enjoy! First segment here. Second segment here.
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. The recent financial crisis has shown that the legal and regulatory steps that have been taken to provide information […]
Read more...But opacity, leverage, and moral hazard are not accidental byproducts of otherwise salutary innovations; they are the direct intent of the innovations. No one at the major capital markets firms was celebrated for creating markets to connect borrowers and savers transparently and with low risk. After all, efficient markets produce minimal profits. They were instead […]
Read more...In the various blogosphere efforts to dissect the Goldman Abacus transaction now in the SEC’s crosshairs, some commentators have characterized it as unusual, a “bespoke” CDO“, or “a very complicated deal…a supersynthetic CDO.” Effectively, the view is that Abacus is a multi-tranche variant on the single tranche CDO structure that was developed with corporate CDS, […]
Read more...Reader Hubert sent along this post, with permission, and the following note: My friend Erwin has published a book out of ten years of columns for the German paper “Die Welt”. He put an Intro in front of it where he lays out why Germany will go down the tubes as everybody else. It is […]
Read more...Enjoy! View the segment here.
Read more...Enjoy! You can view the segment here.
Read more...One of the things that has been striking as revelation of bad behavior in the collateralized debt market has gotten more press is that a number of commentators who had taken the “nothing to see here, move on” stance have gotten religion. Even more dramatic has been the change in perception of Goldman. The firm […]
Read more...A Bloomberg story today on Neil Barofsky, the head of the Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or SIGTARP, contained this explosive little item (hat tip Tom F): The TARP watchdog has also criticized Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner in reports and in congressional testimony for his handling of […]
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