Some commentators on the surprising and not terribly well received unilateral move by Germany to ban naked credit default swaps on sovereign debt and shorting of bank stocks assumed it was intended to placate domestic voters. Merkel’s move to join the Eurozone rescue effort was wildly unpopular at home; taking a tough line with speculators […]
Read more...It isn’t hard to see that the lack of decent information about how serious the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is is almost certainly due to obfuscation on the part of BP. The puzzling part is how BP can fantasize that it ultimately gains from this conduct, and why the Obama Administration tolerates it. The frustration […]
Read more...Today provided yet another example of how the best government money can buy works. The Senate majority leader Harry Reid suffered an embarrassing defeat when his effort to pass a motion for cloture, which would have stopped debate on the financial reform bill, failed due to two Democrat and one Republican defection among the votes […]
Read more...When the SEC filed its civil suit against Goldman, the firm and its stalwarts argued that the firm would come through with its reputation intact. Anyone who watched Goldman over the last decade had reason to doubt that cheery view. The firm has undergone a remarkable change, from one that was notoriously aggressive but had […]
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...Some readers and commentators have argued that the EU should not have bailed out Greece, but instead should have restructured its debt. The logic is that Greece is a goner; there is no way it can meet its existing obligations, and a bailout serves to throw good money after bad. Better to engage in triage […]
Read more...Yves here. We’ve tended to focus on unsavory practices on the institutional end of the financial services market because they played a major role in the financial crisis, yet have not gotten the media coverage they merit. But some questionable conduct on the retail end only gets intermittent attention, even though it is also a […]
Read more...By Jan Kregel, former professor of economics at Università degli Studi di Bologna and Johns Hopkins,m and currently a senior scholar at The Levy Economics Institute and Rob Parenteau, CFA, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge, editor of The Richebacher Letter, and a research associate of The Levy Economics Institute A week ago eurocrats launched their […]
Read more...It’s starting to fell like 2007 and 2008 all over again: banks suddenly cautious about lending to each other, with the stress spilling into other markets. Per Bloomberg: The cost to hedge against losses on European bank bonds is 63 percent higher than a month earlier. Investment-grade corporate debt sales in the region plummeted 88 […]
Read more...Ooh, this gets uglier and uglier the harder one looks at this. From the Associated Press via ABC (hat tip reader Glenn Stehle): The federal agency responsible for ensuring that an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico was operating safely before it exploded last month fell well short of its own policy that inspections […]
Read more...The drama of financial regulatory reform is, to a considerable degree, playing right into the industry’s hands. I have several pet theories as to why this has happened. One is the fact that the drafting of new rules and the related horse-trading started before there had been any meaningful investigations, and more important, there did […]
Read more...At first blush, Greece’s prime minister George Papandreou statement that he is looking into litigation against banks that worsened the country’s financial woes sounds like pandering to his electorate. From Bloomberg: Papandreou said the decision on whether to go after U.S. banks will be made after a Greek parliamentary investigation into the cause of the […]
Read more...Many of my investor buddies e-mail each other frequently during the day (yes, e-mail, not IM or tweet) and I am on the periphery of some of their discussions. One of them took note of the fact that the libertarians in this crowd had gone silent on the question of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, […]
Read more...Most of the major figures in the financial crisis have had an “insert foot in mouth and chew” moment, although none have yet proven as memorable as Irving Fisher’s “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” less than a week before the Great Crash of 1929 commenced. Bernanke’s was his March […]
Read more...By Richard Smith, a London-based capital markets IT consultant Tracking the changes to the US financial reform package in minute detail would drive you nuts. But there is a quick and dirty alternative: simply compare the Geithner/Summers trailer from July ’09 with the latest one (Geithner, solo, last week, Thursday 6th May, 2010). They each […]
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