No, we don’t mean the end of the world, but the end of this credit cycle. An aside: forgive us if you found some of our posts last week sketchier than usual. We’re at a location with very erratic broadband, which makes it hard to get anything Internet-related done efficiently. We’ve run a few comments […]
Read more...Here’s some lighter fare, but in keeping with post above, from Minyanville via Barry Ritzhold’s The Big Picture: Once upon a time there was a family of three bears, a mama bear, a papa bear and a baby bear. This family of bears lived in a quiet cottage in the woods. One day, waiting for […]
Read more...The Housing Bubble Blog put the question more neutrally in its post headline, “When Did Lending Standards Start Charging So Much?,” but the responses all point in one direction: Readers suggested a topic on when loan standards changed. “Here’s my question for the gang – when did lending standards start changing so much? I was […]
Read more...We’ve commented from time to time on loose credit conditions (see our “Rising Tide of Liquidity“, plus Part 2 and Part 3 on the same topic) and indifference to risk (“Where Has the (Perception of) Risk Gone?“). The tide may be turning. Today, the New York Times had a lengthy, well researched article, “Tremors at […]
Read more...Somehow we missed this Financial Times story when it came out on January 19, but it is still germane. Titled “The unease bubbling in today’s brave new financial world,” it’s Gillian Tett’s follow up to a story she wrote on the raging growth of structured finance (covered in our January 16 post, “The Rising Tide […]
Read more...A good couple of posts from The Big Picture (see the first and second) on the increase in margin debt. The data comes from a Wall Street Journal piece: Such debt is accumulated by investors who trade “on margin” with funds borrowed from their brokers. As tracked by the New York Stock Exchange, margin debt […]
Read more...The Financial Times has had three stories on loose credit conditions in three press days: one on Friday the 12th, two on Monday the 15th, all worried in tone. Apologies for getting this to you on a delayed basis, but the FT website was not cooperating from Friday evening through Monday (colleagues had the same […]
Read more...Usury is becoming a hot topic. We posted on it a few days ago; it is also featured in a January 13 New York Times Op-Ed piece, “Banks Gone Wild” by Joe Lee and Thomas Parrish, which was then picked up in the blogsphere by Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View. From the Times: I owe about […]
Read more...Good post this morning on the debate over what the inverted yield curve means for economic prospects by Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture | Yield Curve: Its different this time. The trigger was that Arthur Laffer has been arguing that the negative yield curve does not point to an impending recession, while a story […]
Read more...When the Pentagon is sticking its nose in an area this far from its native (and very large) sphere of influence, you know something is up. From Reuters: The Pentagon is writing a rule to keep the minds of U.S. troops on their missions by shielding them from debt, but the prospect of the Defense […]
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