Tonight brings an odd pairing: Lord Skidelksy, the highly respected biographer of Keynes, and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who is generally of the Austrian persuasion, both continuing, as each has, to object to the extreme measures in the process of being implemented in the eurozone. Now before you say that they are both Brits, and therefore suspect […]
Read more...Note the fund is to be established over two years, through a combination of dividend cuts and reduction in spending. Moreover, a planned dividend payment for June 21 is being halted, which would appear to be a meaningful concession. From Bloomberg: Svanberg and Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward agreed to set aside $20 billion over […]
Read more...I’m not quite certain how to calibrate journalism American Banker style, but I found this article, “Challenges to Foreclosure Docs Reach a Fever Pitch,” (sadly, subscription only, e-mailed by Chris Whalen), to be both interesting and more than a tad disingenuous. The spin starts with the headline, it’s a doozy. The “challenge to foreclosure documents” […]
Read more...The Brits appear to understand the danger of having an outside and uncontrolled banking sector relative to the size of their economy. So if it’s too hard to attack TBTF directly, the next best is to put (or be able to put) hard constraints on banking. This proposed authority for the Bank of England is […]
Read more...I’ve been quite mystified at all of this “double dip” recession talk, even though I suppose it beats the “V shaped recovery” talk. Both presuppose that we had a recovery underway, the real sort, not the type that is mainly the artifact of inventory restocking, halting and sometimes covert stimulus, (like hiring unprecedented numbers of […]
Read more...Before European readers get upset about the discussion of continued concerns about the eurozone, some of its eager defenders appear to subscribe to an extreme form of indeterminacy. If you recall the famed Schrodinger’s cat, the indeterminacy of the position of an electron is made (somewhat) more comprehensible by a thought experiment in which a […]
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). It Always Ends in the Same Way … No one, including the IMF, seriously believes that the austerity program announced by Greece will work. Argentina had debt […]
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). A year of wishful thinking … The period from March 2009 was the year of wishful thinking. Central banks cut interest rates and governments opened their cheque […]
Read more...A good Washington DC contact told me that a public relations/media push to demonize those who decide to walk away from mortgages they can still afford to pay (aka “strategic defaulters”) is underway. Expect to see a good bit of moral fervor as those who choose to cut their losses are attacked as immoral, irresponsible, […]
Read more...I know the headline above verges on “dog bites man” but the New York Times story, “In Louisville, View of Banks’ Role in the Everyday” is pure financial services industry PR masquerading as Norman Rockwellesque treacle. I know Fridays in the summer are usually slow news days, and the Grey Lady might occasionally have to […]
Read more...Bloomberg notes that Goldman’s president Gary Cohn has stated that the firm is not close to a settlement of the SEC’s fraud case against it for one of its Abacus CDOs. Note that this is contrary to rumor and speculation as recent as last week and suggests talks are pretty close to dead. The SEC […]
Read more...It is not a sign of intelligence to repeat a course of action and expect different results. Yet our officialdom is doing pretty much just that on the economic front. Treasury and the Fed in particular seem quite pleased with their success in patching up the financial system with duct tape and baling wire and […]
Read more...The latest shoe to drop on the Goldman front is the report on Wednesday that the SEC was investigating yet another one of its synthetic CDOs, this one a $2 billion confection called Hudson. It isn’t clear whether the SEC will file charges, but this one has the potential to be particularly damaging in the […]
Read more...From HousingWire: Of all of the foreclosures in the RealtyTrac online database, less than 50% have mortgages worth less than what is owed, said Rick Sharga, senior vice president at RealtyTrac, during a session at REO Expo, which concludes in Dallas Wednesday…. The overall unemployment rate dropped slightly to 9.7% in May, from 9.9% in […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ influential economics editor, takes issue with the austerity fad that is sweeping governments in advanced economies. From his comment: Against this background, what would a big tightening of fiscal policy deliver? In the absence of effective monetary policy offsets, one would expect aggregate demand to weaken, possibly sharply. Some economists […]
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