This post first appeared on April 16, 2007 I always take note when a writer takes a position that is contrary to his usual stance. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution is an intelligent and thoughtful commentator, but hews too closely to free market orthodoxy for my taste. But his review of Maggie Mahar’s Money- Driven […]
Read more...Felix guessed how this Structured Finance issue pipeline would get sorted out, for the moment. Three not necessarily inconsistent takes on causes and effects: A neat way to embarrass the government. The rating agency logjam and the GM deal announced yesterday are closely related: if there’s one thing GM will think it still needs for […]
Read more...Richard covering for Yves here, in case that maritime internet connection, which seems OK for terse emails, is not so great for navigating 100 eurowebsites, to whizz through as much detail as possible. Just seven failures, making Chris Whalen’s EU stress tests: who knows, who cares? the main takeaway, I suppose. Not enough blood to […]
Read more...Tomorrow’s the big day. German overview, with scenarios on page 2. The D-Day metaphor is a waggish translation choice by the Englishers at “Der Spiegel” (the original has “Nervöse Finanzbranche”). Summaries of the results will be published at the CEBS, possibly at 18:00 CEST; which is 11:00 EST, if that helps some of you, but […]
Read more...Cross posted from The Economic Populist. By Garrett Johnson Most people think that the Wall Street bailouts ended at least a year ago. They would be wrong. (Reuters) – Increased housing commitments swelled U.S. taxpayers’ total support for the financial system by $700 billion in the past year to around $3.7 trillion, a government watchdog […]
Read more...A surprise for the ratings agencies, the bond market, and me, too – this has to be a late change in the Financial Reform bill, and it’s a corker. From the WSJ: The nation’s three dominant credit-ratings providers have made an urgent new request of their clients: Please don’t use our credit ratings. The odd […]
Read more...Joint post by Richard Smith and Tom Adams, a securities lawyer The fabulous Fab has entered his solo response to the SEC’s complaint. It provides an interesting glimpse into what are certainly complex legal strategies by Tourre, Goldman and the SEC. The list of his stated defenses are at the bottom. First, the response may […]
Read more...Back to this thing to try to work out what it’s driving at. Yves wrote: I have serious trouble with its bottom line: We document that the shadow banking system became severely strained during the financial crisis because, like traditional banks, shadow banks conduct credit, maturity, and liquidity transformation, but unlike traditional financial intermediaries, they […]
Read more...Crossposted from New Deal 2.0 By Marshall Auerback, Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and a market analyst and commentator. FinReg may fall short if power is channeled into Geithner’s hands. More depressing news from the “change” President. The Washington Post has reported that one of the major impacts of the FinReg bill passed last week […]
Read more...Back in January, the preposterous projected 99-year return on this Green Oil caught my eye; it reminded me of an ostrich scam a few years back, under which, if you took it literally, the entire surface of the world would have been carpeted with ostriches rather quickly; to the great enrichment of all, naturally. Then […]
Read more...Cross-posted from http://www.presimetrics.com/blog/ By Mike Kimel of Presimetrics This post is going to be a bit different, at least for me. Generally I like to write things that are more data oriented, and that involve some pictures and figures. But this is a little story that happened to my wife and me, only a few […]
Read more...Can any of you shed light on these reader questions about tax havens? The US tolerance for tax havens is puzzling, given that the US taxes citizens on their income earned anywhere in the world, and takes a dim view of foreign bank accounts (I am under the impression the rules have been tightened even […]
Read more...To say there is no love lost between Treasury and Elizabeth Warren is probably putting it mildly. Treasury was gunning for her ouster in early 2009; I heard multiple accounts both of how concerted the Administration opposition to her was (recall she was actually chosen as head of the Congressional Oversight Panel before the regime […]
Read more...By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive and Yves Smith A common fallacy is to assume that situations are polar: win/lose, black/white, hot/cold, heads/tails. But more often, given A, “not A” is not the opposite of A. Conventional wisdom in the financial media is that the settlement announced by the SEC over its […]
Read more...Goldman’s stock was trading at $140.15 at 3:26 PM today. It moved more than 4 points in the next ten minutes. I got wind that the settlement announcement was set for 4:45 PM at around 4:00 PM. I pinged a journalist at a major financial media outlet to find out whether there had been an […]
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