Arjun Jayadev at Triple Crisis provides a quote from Thomas Phillipon that somehow never sees the light of day in the financial press:
Read more...…the unit cost of intermediation is higher today than it was a century ago, and it has increased over the past 30 years. One interpretation is that improvements in information technology may have been cancelled out by increases in other financial activities whose social value is difficult to assess.
Quite a few readers excitedly sent a link to a Bloomberg editorial, “Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year?” which summarizes a study by Kenichi Ueda of the International Monetary Fund and Beatrice Weder di Mauro of the University of Mainz that the editors used to extrapolate that the five biggest US banks are “barely profitable” if they weren’t able to borrow at artificially cheap rates thanks to the market perception that they are too big too fail.
The Bloomberg article, while analytically flawed, still winds up being too charitable.
Read more...It’s really easy to have a fortress balance sheet if you can get other people to eat your losses
Read more...By Paul De Grauwe, Professor of international economics, London School of Economics, and former member of the Belgian parliament, and Yuemei Ji, Economist, LICOS, University of Leuven. Cross posted from VoxEU
Eurozone policy seems driven by market sentiment. This column argues that fear and panic led to excessive, and possibly self-defeating, austerity in the south while failing to induce offsetting stimulus in the north. The resulting deflation bias produced the double-dip recession and perhaps more dire consequences. As it becomes obvious that austerity produces unnecessary suffering, millions may seek liberation from ‘euro shackles’.
Read more...The normally astute and blunt Martin Wolf is either having an uncharacteristic bout of circumspection or is managing to miss an important, arguably determining reason why the Eurozone persists in inflicting destructive austerity on much of its population.
Read more...Bethany McLean just released a piece at Reuters which presents a good overview of the Department of Justice case against rating agency Standard and Poor’s for its conduct in rating residential mortgage backed securities and CDOs.* The high level description of the case, in particular, why the government used FIRREA as its cause of action, is helpful.
I have mixed feeling about taking issue with McLean, since she generally does a fine job of reporting and analysis, but there were some things about her piece that were so surprising that I thought they really needed to be discussed.
Read more...By Ian Fraser, a financial journalist who blogs at his web site and at qfinance. His Twitter is @ian_fraser. [An edited version of this article was published on pages 34-35 of the Sunday Herald on February 10th, 2013].
It has been described as the biggest banking felony in history … yet no-one has been prosecuted for the Libor fixing scandal. Ian Fraser looks at the RBS sacrificial lambs.
During Royal Bank of Scotland’s IT meltdown last summer, chief executive Stephen Hester referred to the risk “that you turn over rocks and find new things [that you have to clean up].” Last Wednesday, nearly five years on from the £45.5 billion taxpayer funded rescue of the Edinburgh based lender, a vast rock was hoisted aloft by three regulators. What lurked underneath was not a pleasant sight.
Read more...By Yanis Varoufakis, Professor of Economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his blog
Ireland and Portugal have, recently, tested the water of the money markets with some success. But does this mean that they are out of the woods?
Read more...By Robert Guttmann, Professor of Economics at Hofstra University and a visiting Professor at University of Paris, Nord. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
A strange calm has settled over Europe. Following Mr. Draghi’s July 2012 promise “to do whatever it takes” to save the euro, which the head of the European Central Bank followed shortly thereafter with a new program of potentially unlimited bond buying known as “outright monetary transactions,” the market panic evaporated. This calming of once-panicky debt markets has led to optimistic assessments that the worst of the crisis has passed. All this begs the obvious question whether this major shift in mood is justified and as such durable or just a temporary break before the next storm.
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and commentator. Cross posted from Alternet.
Is Eric Holder’s “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” Department of Justice finally getting serious about investigating fraud on Wall Street?
Read more...By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
While the latest European PMI is showing some improvement it has become apparent that imbalances are growing ever-greater in the zone.
Read more...Wow, one of my big assumptions about mortgage putback cases has been turned on its ear, much to the detriment of Bank of America and JP Morgan. If you thought there were pitched legal battles on this front, a key ruling by Judge Jed Rakoff means you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Read more...I know cynicism-hardened Naked Capitalism readers will expect the answer to the question in the headline to be “no”. But based on a summary of the filing at Bloomberg (and having conferred with lawyers on this beat), the answer looks more like “possibly yes”.
Read more...There have been so many bailouts settlements of various bank mortgage misdeeds that it’s no doubt hard to keep them straight unless you are on this beat. But the short version is I’m delighted at this effort to throw a monkey wrench in the Bank of America settlement.
By George Feiger, CEO of Contango Capital Advisors. From Contango’s current “Heard off the Street” newsletter
We question whether the widely held judgment that the US handled its banking crisis much better than the Europeans will survive the inevitable upturn in interest rates.
Read more...