Various readers wrote us, and it was confirmed by a detailed report on the call at DealBreaker, that the Treasury Department held a conference call this evening for analysts on the bailout bill. A memo was evidently sent to SIFMA members; others may have been contacted by other means. But the report I got from […]
Read more...See here, sports fans. At least it isn’t three pages long any more. I haven’t gotten past noting that it is a “discussion draft”. Hope to have more substantive comments in due order. The Troubled Assets are initially limited to commercial and residential mortgages and instruments based on them. The Treasury has to go to […]
Read more...Apparently there has been a pretty weird announcement. Progress is being made to sound like resolution. Since the House Republicans weren’t part of the photo op, it isn’t at all clear whether this is real. First sighting from Clusterstock, will add updates as they come in: Update (12:35 a.m.): Nancy Pelosi speaks first. She says […]
Read more...The mainstream media, giving reports from Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi, who said last week there was a bailout deal imminent, are giving similar chipper reports of progress with appropriate caveats. From the New York Times, “Consensus on Rescue Plan Is Said to Be Near“: After a tumultuous week, including a contentious meeting at the […]
Read more...Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times reports that Goldman and no other Wall Street firm was involved in the AIG rescue talks and an AIG failure would have created a hole as big as $20 billion in Goldman’s balance sheet. This is special dealing, pure and simple. Even if AIG needed to be salvaged […]
Read more...The quote above comes from Robert Bennett (Senate, R-Utah) and while no doubt narrowly true (presumably it’s Wachovia), implying that the bank will go under due to the failure to implement the Paulson plan is just plain dishonest. The bank has been wobbly for a very long time and t isn’t at all clear that […]
Read more...The IMF just released a study that analyzed 124 banking crises, and I wish everyone in Congress (well, at least their staffers), the Treasury, and the Fed read the paper. It provides insight into what worked and didn’t work in past banking crises, and gives an idea of what we might expect from various policy […]
Read more...Some readers would have a go at me whenever I’d post articles by the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. Although he has a tendency to hyperventilate and sometimes oversimplifies, he regularly points to data and research that I haven’t seen covered elsewhere. More important, his major calls this year have been correct. He predicted the oil price […]
Read more...From Forbes (hat tip reader The Social Pathologist): In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy. “It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
Read more...Hope you like the smell of napalm in the morning. Otherwise, this will not be your sort of day. I have to turn in, but the early morning sightings, as expected, are not at all pretty. What is particularly troubling is that central bank interventions may have become unproductive. Banks have quit lending to each […]
Read more...The unravelling that started with the Freddie and Fannie conservatorship has exacted a toll not just on dollar-denominated paper but on financial assets around the world. As they have fallen, so too has the standing of the US, which zealously promoted liberalized capital markets and saw US firms establish dominant positions when those rules were […]
Read more...Boy, by the time this is all done, what won’t JP Morgan own (well, besides Countrywide)? FDIC is winding up WaMu. The bank had been struggling to find a resolution for some time, and an FDIC takeover would have strained the agency’s resources. But one has to why JP Morgan took this on at such […]
Read more...From the Washington Post: House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said the bailout deal reached by key lawmakers calls for dividing the $700 billion pricetag into three parts: Paulson would receive $250 billion immediately and another $100 billion upon White House certification of its necessity. The final $350 billion could be dispersed without […]
Read more...While we have focused on the fact that the Treasury bailout plan, which with some tweaks, is moving towards approval. is a covert and inefficient recapitalization of the banking system, other observers see another goal for the plan. The contend that its main purpose is to circumvent mark-to-market accounting. The belief is that mark to […]
Read more...While there have been various reports during the day that a version 2.0 of the Treasury bailout bill was moving towards passage, the agreement in principle now appears to be official. From the Wall Street Journal: A bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers left a two-hour-plus meeting in the U.S. Capitol on Thursday saying […]
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