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). Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth Rogoff (2009) This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly; Princeton University Press, London Raghuram G. Rajan (2010) Fault Lines: How […]
Read more...As much as I have been a consistent critic of Geithner in his role as one of the chief enablers of the banking industry, he deserves credit for this succinct remarks at the G-20 via Bloomberg (hat tip reader Scott): In a sign of tension among the world’s economic policy chiefs, Geithner flagged concern that […]
Read more...I owe readers a longer comment on this, since we may be going into crisis mode (ah, the joys of waking up and toddling out to the computer to see what wheels are falling off the global financial system today). Your humble blogger may be a bit jaded (two years of watching the crisis and […]
Read more...I’ve seen some eye-poppin’, credulity-stretchin’ accounts in my time. The report “The Budgetary Impact and Subsidy Costs of the Federal Reserve’s Actions During the Financial Crisis,” just released by the Congressional Budget Office, ranks with the most extreme. It claims that the budgetary cost (which corresponds roughly to expected losses) of the Fed rescue facilities […]
Read more...Brad DeLong points out that Ronald Reagan was far more concerned about unemployment than Team Obama (or Washington generally) is, and also took far more aggressive measures to combat it. From The Week (hat tip reader Marshall): By the start of 1983, labor unions were frantically giving back previously-promised wage increases and offering wage cuts […]
Read more...Public officials of all sorts have tried ratcheting up their halting efforts to Do Something about Wall Street chicanery to appease an unhappy public. One manifestation has been increased frequency of a long-established enforcement pattern, of picking off select, high profile targets while leaving many corrupt practices in place. The object lesson du jour is […]
Read more...By Bob Goodwin, a medical device entrepreneur Yves here. Bob’s post highlights a shift in attitudes that is entirely logical and is the inevitable result of financial firms, taking an increasingly predatory posture toward their customers. Borrowers are responding in kind, by taking a cold-blooded and legalistic look at their agreements with lenders. Banks may […]
Read more...Reader Richard Smith provided a sighting of bank boosterism, courtesy The Economist: The happy secret of Western banking is that the system in aggregate now has lots of capital (see chart) relative to the net losses experienced over the crisis. The kind of erosion of capital forecast by the Federal Reserve’s stress tests last year, […]
Read more...During the crisis of 2007-2008, there was fair bit of discussion of the so-called Minsky Moment, when an economy that has built a house of cards of speculation and over-leveraged “Ponzi units” (creditors that could never make good on their commitments, and are viable only by finding new suckers to give them new debt to […]
Read more...Just when you thought financial firm accounting couldn’t get more dubious…it gets worse. Deux Ex Macchiato (hat tip FT Alphaville) tells of the disconcerting changes to what was formerly called FAS Rule 157, which brought us Level 1, 2, and 3 accounting. A brief recap: Readers may recall that the Financial Standards Accounting Board implemented […]
Read more...Wolfgang Munchau, in the Financial Times, revives a line of thought that was voiced from time to time during the financial crisis: that some countries (the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland) had banking sectors that were so large that it was an open question as to whether they could credibly backstop them. One of the […]
Read more...Hhhm, are investigations disappearing into the night just like FDIC resolutions, Friday night massacres so as not to upset the great unwashed public? Joe Cassano, head of AIG’s Financial Products Group and individual most responsible for the insurer’s collapse, will not be prosecuted. Per the Wall Street Journal: Federal prosecutors will not bring criminal charges […]
Read more...It’s hard to tell whether the story at the Guardian, based on a memo apparently leaked by Germany’s finance ministry, is overstating the situation in contending that changes Germany will demand for the euro regime could require a Lisbon treaty negotiation. From the article: Following Greece’s debt emergency and with the euro in the throes […]
Read more...By Warren Mosler, a fund manager, co-founder and Distinguished Research Associate of The Center for Full Employment And Price Stability at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, and creator of the modern euro swap futures contract. Gillian Tett of the Financial Times wrote today about stress in the dollar funding markets, which she regards […]
Read more...Some commentators on the surprising and not terribly well received unilateral move by Germany to ban naked credit default swaps on sovereign debt and shorting of bank stocks assumed it was intended to placate domestic voters. Merkel’s move to join the Eurozone rescue effort was wildly unpopular at home; taking a tough line with speculators […]
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