Equities and commodities markets rallied on the belief that Greece would be rescued, and that notion is increasingly looking accurate. The Telegraph provides an update (hat tip Swedish Lex): Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, has asked officials to prepare a plan in time for a summit of EU leaders on Thursday, according to reports in […]
Read more...Two readers, Don B and Marshall Auerback, pointed to a Ambrose Evans-Pritchard story at the Telegraph which argues the the sovereign debt perturbations have the potential to have ramifications as serious as the subprime/Alt-A crisis. Now Evans-Pritchard has a tendency to the apocalyptic, but he also made some astute calls in 2007 and 2008 (as […]
Read more...By Yves Smith and Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive Gretchen Morgenson has a lengthy article tonight at the New York Times, “Testy Conflict With Goldman Helped Push A.I.G. to Edge.” While it provides some useful new tidbits, it peculiarly focuses on an aspect of Goldman’s dealings with AIG that, particularly with the […]
Read more...By Rolfe Winkler, a former hedge fund analyst Alexi Giannoulias — the whippersnapper IL State Treasurer and basketball buddy of the President — won the Democratic primary for Senate Tuesday night. Given Giannoulias’ troubling background, including ties to a bank that received a rebuke from FDIC just a week ago, how much political capital will […]
Read more...Hhhm. Even though the UK 50% bonus “supertax” was deemed to be a bit of a failure (the banks just grossed up bonuses to compensate for the levy), Senators Barbara Boxer and James Webb have proposed a similar measure, and one wonders how it might fend off the sort of gaming that plagued the UK […]
Read more...By Joshua Rosner, a managing director of an independent financial services research firm who writes for New Deal 2.0 In Geithner’s AIG testimony before the House Oversight Committee, the Secretary again tried to sell the notion that ‘if we didn’t act then, millions more would have lost their jobs and thousands of factories would have […]
Read more...If anyone had any doubts as to whether the Federal Reserve should assume the role of systemic risk regulator, a comment in the Financial Times by Board of Governors member Kevin Warsh, based on a speech he is to give later today, puts the matter firmly to rest. No matter how logically positioned a central […]
Read more...And after those nice Europeans gave Obama that peace prize! (well, the Nobel foundation provides the funding, Norwegians make the pick, dunno how EU members felt). From the Financial Times: President Barack Obama will not attend a European Union-US summit to have been held in Spain in May, dealing a further blow to the EU’s […]
Read more...We’ve argued that the “Volcker Rule,” which would limit “proprietary trading” by banks, is in theory a very good idea, but the proposal put forward by Volcker/Team Obama goes wide of the mark by defining any customer trade as not being part of proprietary trading. That’s a spurious distinction; large-scale position-taking well beyond what was […]
Read more...The folks at Goldman, and Blankfein in particular, really do not get it. From Times Online: Goldman Sachs, the world’s richest investment bank, could be about to pay its chief executive a bumper bonus of up to $100 million in defiance of moves by President Obama to take action against such payouts. Bankers in Davos […]
Read more...Ambrose Evans-Pritchard today has his usual type of offering: extreme, but nevertheless based on a valid observation, on his favorite hobbyhorse, the EMU. His key observation comes at the end: EMU architects were warned in the early 1990s that monetary union would prove unworkable as constructed. They scoffed, sure that any crisis could be exploited […]
Read more...We have a President who, in his displays of pique against banksters, can work himself up to calling them “fat cats”. But immediately after that, um, display, he met with bank CEOs (well, the ones that didn’t stand him up) and was conciliatory, when the right move would be to show some steel. And when, […]
Read more...Is the modern version of “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” “Beware of ‘reform’ proposals that bankers favor”? The fact that banksters seem to be bowing to the inevitable, that they will have to submit to some changes in how they do business, should be a step in the right direction. But their inability to accept […]
Read more...The vote on Bernanke’s confirmation produced 30 “no” votes, more than any previous vote on a Fed chairman, even exceeding those against Paul Volcker after he had driven the economy into the most severe post-recession downturn in his effort to wring inflation out of the economy. But that was still a comfortable win, right, even […]
Read more...This via e-mail from reader Scott: But as someone else on the thread remarked, “He thinks he needs a ‘decoder ring’ for that?”
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