By Richard Smith, a London-based capital markets IT consultant In my last post, “Tracking the Rabbit through the Anaconda” , I mocked Geithner a bit and promised you all a spot of moaning about what’s missing from the financial reform bill. Well, the anaconda has now had the time it needed to produce its offering. […]
Read more...By Rob Parenteau, CFA, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge, editor of The Richebacher Letter, and a research associate of The Levy Economics Institute Richard Alford has correctly identified the need to address global imbalances – rather than simply slouch our way back to some milder version of status quo before the pre- Lehman meltdown arrangement, […]
Read more...I want the word “reform” back. Between health care “reform” and financial services “reform,” Obama, his operatives, and media cheerleaders are trying to depict both initiatives as being far more salutary and far-reaching than they are. This abuse of language is yet another case of the Obama Adminsitration using branding to cover up substantive shortcomings. […]
Read more...By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive When the financial crisis hit, I was in the direct line of fire. My company blew up very early in the crisis, giving me the dubious opportunity to see how bad things were going to get long before most of the rest of the world, including […]
Read more...One of the dead bodies in plain sight that generally goes unremarked upon in polite company is the buyers’ strike in the securitization market. Issuance of private label (as in non-government guaranteed) residential mortgage backed securities has collapsed, with government entities insuring 96.5% of all home mortgages in the first quarter 2010. The commercial mortgage […]
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Read more...It is not a sign of intelligence to repeat a course of action and expect different results. Yet our officialdom is doing pretty much just that on the economic front. Treasury and the Fed in particular seem quite pleased with their success in patching up the financial system with duct tape and baling wire and […]
Read more...I must confess that I am only now reading John Brook’s classic Once in Golconda, which is a history of Wall Street from the 1920 to 1938. It’s a heady mix of lush and leisurely narrative with keen attention to financial tradecraft. Of course, any tale that involves market manipulation, no matter how far in […]
Read more...Bloomberg has a detailed story up on its website about a pending Department of Justice suit that charges that municipalities were not simply played for fools by big financial firms and sold down the river by their supposed advisers. Sadly, that is all too common. What is noteworthy here is that the advisers engaged in […]
Read more...The line of thinking that underlies an investigation by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo is a challenge to conventional wisdom about the financial crisis. The prevailing view is that since credit ratings were one of the single biggest points of failure in the crisis, the ratings agencies were one of the biggest, if not […]
Read more...Frank Partnoy, derivatives salesman turned law professor, took an ill fated star turn in the Financial Times today. In a comment titled, “Goldman is wrong target for official censure,” he writes (among other things): “Goldman is not to blame for the financial crisis,” a straw man if I ever saw one. I hate to say […]
Read more...A lot of people are still feeling very bruised by last Friday’s market actions (Felix Salmon went as far as ordering all retail investors to get out of the pool). A message from a reader with ample trading desk experience: BTW, hope you didn’t have any sell-stops yesterday, WTF was that?!?!? I covered my SPY […]
Read more...By Buzz Potamkin, former studio executive and producer, in the biz for 40+ years, now a consultant Every investment in film is gambling. Schuyler Moore, April 22, 2010, testimony before the House Agriculture Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities Futures are a hedge against some event yet to come, representing the desire by a participant to […]
Read more...Would you believe the chairman of a financial firm who told you that he was going to be able to pay off his loans to you when: 1. The company was showing a not-negative net worth ONLY because it had marked down its loans on its accounting statements by 7.5%, even when the loan agreement […]
Read more...By Yves Smith and Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive The Fed and its friends and enablers in power, most recently Rahm Emanuel, are fighting tooth and nail to beat back the Audit the Fed amendments to pending financial reform legislation. That’s unfortunate and misguided. Even a cursory inspection of the Fed’s disclosures […]
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