Ilargi: Ukraine Warheads
A prescient piece on the trajectory of Ukraine-Russia tensions.
Read more...A prescient piece on the trajectory of Ukraine-Russia tensions.
Read more...Where you wind up when you take libertarian ideas to their logical conclusion…..
Read more...How businesses created Americanization Day, later Independence Day, to counter the rising labor movement.
Read more...Evidence that the justification for putting student loan borrowers on the rack was ideological garbage.
Read more...A classic from our market commentary in the runup to the financial crisis.
Read more...In 2007, the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf Wolf concluded that America needed some form of a welfare state. His argument is as valid now as then. Yet it is hard to imagine that anyone would make it now, particularly in light of the effort of soi-disant liberals to pretend that Obamacare insurance policies bear any resemblance to “universal health care”.
Read more...How Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, whether for profit or by accident, has denied the public the truth about what really causes the crisis.
Read more...As I like to say, I started out on Wall Street when it was criminal only at the margin. The unseemly coziness between Goldman and keygovernment agencies in critical episodes during the crisis illustrates how much standards of conduct have deteriorated.
Read more...Dear readers,
We reinstituting a Naked Capitalism feature, the summer rerun. The last time we reprised an archival NC post (aside from a few more recent ones by Matt Stoller) was a July 9, 2009 post that we published again on December 29, 2011.
Interestingly, picking up again from 2009 serves as a reminder of issues that were hot in the aftermath of the crisis that were not addressed adequately, if at all. Here, we discuss the mystery of the magnitude of Lehman’s losses. We pointed out that they are so large and impossible to explain that there had to be accounting fraud, but the bankruptcy overseer had its own reasons not go to there.
Note that this post was published eights months before Anton Valukus released his report on the Lehman bankruptcy, which described the Repo 105 ruse that allowed Lehman to hide over $50 billion of dodgy assets at quarter end and thus not include them in its financial reports.
Read more...“I’m flabbergasted. I’m embarrassed. This is the biggest screw-up electorally that I’ve ever been involved in,” said one progressive activist still sorting through the wreckage.
Read more...If you think Independence Day came to be a national holiday as an organic expression of pride in our successful rebellion against England, you need to think twice.
Read more...Remarks rumored to have been delivered by Justice Antonin Scalia at an Opus Dei gathering on July 4, 2011
Eleven score and fifteen years ago our Incorporators brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in free markets, and dedicated to the proposition that all corporate persons are created equal.
Read more...Edward Harrison here. I was reading Yves’ excellent post on The Top Twelve Reasons Why You Should Hate the Mortgage Settlement and I thought about a post I wrote a year ago on what this was all about. I am re-posting this post verbatim below but I just want to say a few words first. […]
Read more...This post first appeared on July 8, 2009
John Kay comes perilously close to nailing a key issue in his current Financial Times comment, “Our banks are beyond the control of mere mortal” in that he very clearly articulates the problem very well but then draws the wrong conclusion:
Read more...Yves here. It’s interesting to note that the point of the stress test exercise was to build confidence in the banks so they could raise equity at not massively dilutive prices and rebuild their balance sheets. But the Administration appeared to believe its own PR and relented on pushing the banks to raise capital levels (if you doubt me, look at how much walked out the door in record 2009 and 2010 bonuses).
This post first appeared on April 9, 2009
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 and the public: the banking industry, broadly speaking, seems to be in better shape than many people think, officials involved in the examinations say.
That is the good news. The bad news is that many of the largest American lenders, despite all those bailouts, probably need to be bailed out again, either by private investors or, more likely, the federal government. After receiving many millions, and in some cases, many billions of taxpayer dollars, banks still need more capital, these officials say.
The whole point of this charade exercise was to show the big banks weren’t terminal but still needed dough, and I am sure it will prove to be lots of dough before we are done.