Banks Start Volcker Rule Blame Game
Nothing like being able to use something in the headlines to hide your real behavior. And even better if you can get a banking stalwart columnist to run PR for you.
Read more...Category Archives: Credit markets
Michael Hudson: Trade Advantage Replaced by Rent Extraction
An interview with Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, on the Renegade Economists radio/podcast
Read more...JP Morgan, Not Satisfied with Profitable WaMu Acquisition, Sues FDIC to Extract More
If you are Jamie Dimon, a good deal is apparently never good enough.
Read more...Wolf Richter: Fear And Trembling In Muni Land
Municipal bond investors, a conservative bunch who want to avoid rollercoaster rides and cliffhangers, are getting frazzled. And they’re bailing out of muni bond funds at record rate, while they still can without losing their shirts.
Read more...Ragnarok – Iceland and the ‘Doom of the Gods’
Iceland is widely portrayed as a post-bubble success story, but the reality is more conplex.
Read more...The Eurozone: If Only It Were the 1930s
Yves here. This post looks at the strictures of the Eurozone (debt to GDP and deficit limits) and not surprisingly concludes that the supposedly independent ECB is making matters worse that a more “political,” as in growth oriented one, would. But depicting central bank independence as detrimental is a novel and important argument.
Read more...Volcker Rule: The Devil’s in the Unimpressive Enforcement Details
If you managed to be late to the Volcker Rule party, you can learn a great deal of what you’d need to know via the revealing contrast between two reasonably detailed accounts, one at Huffington Post by Shahien Nasiripour, the other by Matt Levine at Bloomberg. If you didn’t know better, you’d wonder if they were talking about the same rule.
Read more...Big Banks About to Start Booking Second Mortgage Losses They Can No Longer Extend and Pretend Away
Reuters has a new article, Insight: A new wave of U.S. mortgage trouble threatens, which is simultaneously informative and frustrating. It is informative in that it provides some good detail but it is frustrating in that it depicts a long-standing problem aided and abetted by regulators as new.
Read more...Capital Inflows and Booms in Asset Prices
Yves here. This is a tidy and useful addition to the literature on how high levels of international capital flows generate financial instability.
Read more...Eric Ben-Artzi: How Risky is Citigroup’s New, Improved Version of a Once-Toxic Type of Synthetic CDO?
We are all still paying the price for the stream of ever more leveraged credit derivatives that fueled the world’s greatest credit bubble. It appears that some of these are attempting a comeback.
Read more...Servaas Storm: Some Remarks on “Larry Summers, Secular Stagnation and the Crisis of the New Consensus Model”
It is truly ironic to see Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman promote sustaining asset price inflation as the only viable option left to get away from secular stagnation.
Read more...The European Balanced Budget Disaster
In the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, most European governments allowed the automatic stabilisers to kick in and implemented some mild discretionary measures, despite the strictures of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). But it was not long before the siren calls for “fiscal consolidation” arose…
Read more...Wolf Richter: French Megabank – “Germany Should Leave The Eurozone”
France’s government is struggling to stay relevant….and Groupe BPCE may have provided an answer by telling Germany to pay up or exit the Eurozone.
Read more...Why Should Banks be the Only Ones with Accounts at the Fed?
Should everyone with a Social Security number have an account at the Fed?
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: The Emerald Isle Remains in Chains
A conversation with Phil Pilkington on Europe’s disgraceful triumphalism regarding Ireland’s ‘exit’ from its ‘bailout’
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