The financial press has fretted that the problems in the subprime market may spread to other parts of the mortgage market. While defaults and delinquencies aren’t contagious, investors can get nervous and decide they may have been overly optimistic about risks in safer parts of the market. But the next likely casualty isn’t higher grade […]
Read more...Yesterday, we had a link and some commentary on a front-page New York Times article, “Crisis Looms in Mortgages,” by Gretchen Morgenson. Morgenson likes a take-no-prisoners style of writing, and she tends to be controversial due to her forceful articles about CEO pay. I will confess to having read past it (I am inured to […]
Read more...A good article at Bloomberg, “Bernanke, Greenspan Disagree on Impact of Corporate-Profit Peak,” takes a stab at explaining why, personal issues aside, why the current and former Fed chairman are saying different things about the outlook for the economy. In a nutshell, “It’s the profit margins, stupid.” Corporate profit margins have hit a level unequalled […]
Read more...Gretchen Morgenson, in Sunday’s New York Times, has an excellent front page story, “Crisis Looms in Market for Mortgages.” Her forecast is the worst is yet to come. The story describes how delinquencies in the subprime market, already at 12.6%, are already high (we’ve pointed out before that borrowers are also starting to look shaky […]
Read more...An excellent piece today by John Authers in the Financial Times, “Look to US for clues on whether sky is about to fall.” It’s not that he covers new ground, but he does a very good job of characterizing the current state of affairs. However, the piece falls just short of something you could share […]
Read more...One long-standing skeptic about the housing market is Nouriel Roubini of RGE Monitor. You have to sign up for premium content to get his full story (he does give you an initial free peek), but you can get the drift of the gist from his synopsis, “The housing market is still far from bottoming out:” […]
Read more...As you may well know, Martin Wolf is the Financial Times’ award winning economics editor and their lead economics commentator. He is thoughtful, measured, articulate, and takes far greater pains than many of his peers not to overstate his data. So it was stunning to see at the top of the home page of the […]
Read more...We aren’t saying that the market upheaval of last week was caused by fundamentals. It’s hard ex post facto to attribute an unwinding to any one event, or set of events, and in this case, there are many possible culprits. If we had to attribute it to any simple set of causes, it would be […]
Read more...Dealbreaker.com put out a call for a name for terrible Tuesday, “Wanted: What Should We Call Last Tuesday?“ I guarantee my recommendation will never win, so I haven’t even bothered to submit it. But I vote for Groundhog Day. Not in the traditional sense of Punxsutawney Phil serving as rodent weatherman. No, I mean in […]
Read more...Here it is, Sunday evening. The Asian markets are opening down. I don’t know about you, but I am already tired of the events of last week. They don’t appear to be ending anytime soon, despite the attempts at reassurance by various people in positions of authority. And no, I didn’t take a beating. It’s […]
Read more...Paul Krugman, in his Friday New York Times op-ed piece, “The Big Meltdown,” gives his vision of how this week’s market events will play out. Per the title, his take is apocalyptic. Frankly, although it’s a plausible scenario, this isn’t Krugman’s best work. He is a very good political economist, but investment strategy isn’t his […]
Read more...Just a couple of posts ago, we complained about Bernanke talking up the stock market. While that may indeed have been what he was doing (and we don’t approve of that), he may also have been trying to slow action in the credit markets, and that is a legitimate use of his power of the […]
Read more...On the one hand, it’s a relief that the stock markets in the US stabilized today, although the Dow recovering only a bit more than 1/10 of its prior day tumble is hardly a rousing vote of confidence. On the other hand, we have to scratch our heads as to how even this wee bit […]
Read more...The last post gave the bears’ case. Here is a far more optimistic view, “S&P A/D Reading Worst in Ten Years – Rebound Likely Tomorrow,” from Seeking Alpha. FYI, Birinyi is as noted a bull as Roubini is a bear. And they both could be right. Birinyi, after all, is only forecasting today’s results: Birinyi’s […]
Read more...Oooh, if you read DealBreaker.com, it was really miserable to be a trader in the middle of the carnage yesterday. But it’s hard to muster too much sympathy when you recall that the average pay at Goldman last year was just over $620,000. The real test of how serious this really is isn’t simply how […]
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