This could get interesting. The Financial Times tells us that Neil Barofsky, the special investigator general for the TARP, is looking whether banks cooked their books by overvaluing assets to qualify for TARP funding, Remember, bank had to fall into this funny construct of being sick enough to need help, but not so sick as […]
Read more...I have zero sympathy for the kvetching over the banks’ complaints over the supposedly onerous terms for repayment of TARP funds. Let’s review some of the claims: 1. “It was forced on us.” Um, the only time that was arguably true was when Hank Paulson got nine banks together and made a great show of […]
Read more...Should this even qualify as news? From the New York Times: For the last eight weeks, nearly 200 federal examiners have labored inside some of the nation’s biggest banks to determine how those institutions would hold up if the recession deepened. What they are discovering may come as a relief to both the financial industry […]
Read more...Submitted by Rolfe Winkler, publisher of OptionARMageddon The Congressional Oversight Panel released its latest report yesterday. Luckily news outlets reporting on the release (see Bloomberg and Housing Wire) are skipping Warren’s YouTube and Executive summaries–awkward exercises in establishing consensus both of them. They focus instead on the report’s more provocative suggestion, that liquidating failed banks […]
Read more...Willem Buiter takes no prisoners, In his latest post, “The green shoots are weeds growing through the rubble in the ruins of the global economy”, he dispatches the idea that recovery is around the corner (citing Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth’s latest paper on the resolution of financial crises) and points out that the fiscal state […]
Read more...The way things are going, the US taxpayer is going to be backstopping every bond buyer in the US. The latest wrinkle is that the TARP will be extended to “certain eligible” life insurers. The report at the Wall Street Journal is skeletal: The Treasury Department plans to extend the Troubled Asset Relief Program to […]
Read more...We have been saying for some time that the policy premise of the Fed and Treasury has been that the financial crisis is that it is a liquidity crisis, not a solvency crisis. If you are of that school, the fallen prices of various assets is due to a combination of scarcity of funding plus […]
Read more...This is going to get interesting. The head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, Elizabeth Warren, is expected to issue a report this week calling on the Treasury to get much tougher with the big recipients of TARP funds. And if the report in the Guardian is right, the recommendations have been softened a tad so […]
Read more...There are two schools of thought on financial innovation. One is the mainstream view, repeated faithfully by a compliant media, that financial innovation is really really important and under no circumstances must be threatened. Then we have the Old Fart view, best represented by two men who by any standards ought to have retired by […]
Read more...A Bloomberg story gives the not-heartening news that the government-prodded mortgage modifications are producing higher failure rates as the economy decays: Mortgages modified in the third quarter failed at a faster pace than those revised in the first, and the delinquency rate on the least risky loans doubled, signs of deteriorating credit quality, U.S. regulators […]
Read more...One of the disturbing trends of the financial crisis hasn’t simply been the willy-nilly shifting of costs onto the taxpayer, even when there were investors in risk capital, aka bondholders and stockholders, who properly should take the hit first. As distressing is the repeated, flagrant disregard for the rule of law, starting with the Treasury […]
Read more...Let us go back to some basic principles: 1. Despite bank and Administration smoke-blowing to the contrary, the problem with the so-called toxic assets on bank balance sheets is NOT that they cannot be priced, but that banks do not like the prices on offer from willing buyers. We have read anecdotes suggesting that the […]
Read more...The nays on the public private partnership program, the Treasury’s gimmick program to relieve banks of toxic assets, won positive comments from the obvious beneficiaries, namely banks and possible fund managers, and quite a few negative reviews from those worried about the benefits relative to the cost to the taxpayer (such as Nobel prize winners […]
Read more...Is Obama’s leaked view that a “quick and surgical bankruptcy” was a “likely option” for GM and Chrysler form of bizarre brinksmanship? If not, Obama has just painted himself in a corner based on what looks to be some very bad advice. As we will explain below, the notion of a “quick and surgical” bankruptcy […]
Read more...To his credit, Eric Dinallo, the New York Superintendent of Insurance, did take the brewing mess at bond insurers MBIA (under his jurisdiction, and completely intransigent) and Ambac seriously enough to try to Do Something About It. In the end, his efforts came to nought, swept aside in the tidal wave of credit messes. But […]
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