Today, a story about the need to restructure state-owned Dubai World created a bit of a frisson. Dubai is proposing to delay debt payments as it negotiates to extend maturities. According to Bloomberg: Dubai World, with $59 billion of liabilities, is seeking to delay debt payments, sending contracts to protect the emirate against default surging […]
Read more...Yesterday, I went after two targets in one post. The primary one was Andrew Ross Sorkin, who despite the considerable reporting and storytelling skills he demonstrated in Too Big Too Fail, seemed unable to keep a heavy-handed pro-Fed posture out of an article yesterday on the Paul-Grayson-DeMint bill, which more popularly goes by monickers like […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns The Financial Times reports that British regulators have now opened up to reveal more of the details surrounding the emergency aid banks received during the most acute periods of stress to date in the financial crisis. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Federal Reserve continues to resist providing greater details. […]
Read more...Note: this post is by Thomas Adams, at Paykin Krieg and Adams, LLP, and a former managing director at Ambac and FGIC, with some minor additions by yours truly. This is a significant piece of some puzzles he, some other experts who prefer to remain anonymous, and I have been pushing on for several months. […]
Read more...Full disclosure: I love Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail and think everyone should read it. But having said that, Sorkin has spent a bit too much time running with the big dogs. In today’s piece in the New York Times, he hones in on an amendment added to the Paul/Grayson bill passed last […]
Read more...Dear sports fans, your humble blogger, along with a ton of others, got the not-very-embargoed copy of the SIGTARP report on the New York Fed’s conduct with respect to its full payout on AIG’s credit default swaps to its counterparties. The press is treating the report as if it was tough. I was sputtering with […]
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. On Friday, William Dudley, President of FRBNY, gave an excellent presentation on the financial crisis. The speech was a […]
Read more...When has a bureaucrat every wanted to give up on a big slush fund? Particularly one with no strings attached? What is heinous about the discussion of Treasury’s plan to argue that it should have its authority under the TARP extended is the failure to include some of the most basic and troubling issues. First, […]
Read more...What a difference seven years makes. No one had a problem with Japan having super low interest rates and stoking a global carry trade, nor with the US running overly loose monetary policy that led to a real estate bubble that spread its impact beyond our borders via the creation of toxic mortgage product sold […]
Read more...The theater is starting to get interesting. Here in the US we have banker pay theater masquerading as the real thing. Kenneth Feinberg, the so-called pay-czar, struggles to collect a few scalps at the handful of TARP institutions under his domain, with the ever-intransigent AIG making headlines. This of course is meant to distract attention […]
Read more...Goldman is a law unto itself, with no respect for propriety or notions like “fair dealing” (which in many contexts supercede particular contractual provisions). The latest incident of Goldman scumminess is in one of the opaque corners of the credit markets, namely, collateralized debt obligations. Goldman launched a major program of synthetic collateralized debt obligations […]
Read more...A new bit of chicanery illustrates why it’s a lousy idea for the government to allow wards of the state like the GSEs and AIG to operate like kinda-sort private enterprises. When banks were nationalized in Sweden and Norway, the top brass and the boards were fired, and they were given strict goals and operating […]
Read more...Dear God, if you read the media, you’d really think the Congressional huffing and puffing at the banking industry was going to solve the “too big to fail” problem, or even make much of a difference. Folks, I hate to tell you, these remedies fall so far short of what it would take as to […]
Read more...There is a simply intriguing piece up at Reuters, which may signal a shift in the media version of the zeitgeist as more details of l’affaire Benmosche leak out. By way of background, a very good article at the Financial Times underscores a pet theory of mine: that the board knew exactly what it was […]
Read more...David Einhorn, who enjoys his considerable reputation for hard-fought battles against firms with shaky finances and dubious accounting (Allied Capital and Lehman), has taken aim at a new and equally deserving target: credit default swaps. In an interesting bit of synchronicity, Einhorn’s comments in a letter to investors overlap to a considerable degree with a […]
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