I wanted to thank readers for their generous and helpful input on the problems I’ve been having with sites ripping off Naked Capitalism content by putting up entire posts in full without permission, and often without attribution. Even with reader help, however, the process of dealing with this takes effort, and any time I devote […]
Read more...→ Washington’s Blog There’s a double-dip in housing prices (and see this). As CNN points outs: U.S. home prices fell 2% in the third quarter after having gained steadily since early 2009. The S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Index has recorded gains in four of the previous five quarters, including a 4.7% jump between April and […]
Read more...This has been a busy news week, and unfortunately I’ve also had more than the usual number of meetings. Hope to regroup and get some catchup material out over the next few days. ‘New form of life’ loves arsenic BBC GM Confirms, Yes, We’re Losing Money on Every Volt We Build GreenCarReports When it comes […]
Read more...Maybe the American Securitization Forum ought to do its homework before making emphatic and not very well founded claims. Right before Thanksgiving, the ASF released its long-awaited white paper, which argued, basically, that industry standard practices for conveying notes (the borrower IOUs) to securitization trusts were sound. Curious readers new to this can read the […]
Read more...A very good op ed by Thomas Hoenig in the New York Times, “Too Big to Succeed” provides a solid recap of why the business of reining in the too big too fail banks is crucial. It isn’t simply that this is yet another version of “Mission Accomplished”; the bailouts actually made industry concentration worse, […]
Read more...Well, even under the compulsion of law, the Fed chooses not to comply. Should we be surprised that it continues to refuse to make mandated disclosures? In this case, as reported by Bloomberg, the Fed has withheld information that was of the collateral posted by borrowers to secure $885 billion of loans. Without this information, […]
Read more...I claimed the other day, from memory, that the Landesbanken plus Deutsche had dumped EUR35Bn in the Iceland crash. That’s a spectacular claim, but unfortunately not at all true. A bit of polite throatclearing from commenter Hubert got me to dig through the bankruptcy wind-ups of Kaupthing, Glitnir and Landsbanki. Based on a wikileak of […]
Read more...…turns out to be Trichet, this week, anyway; the bond markets are soothed. Two key comments: We have got a monetary federation. We need quasi-budget federation as well. a statement which ought to have all the Eurosceptics, and many others, chorussing “told ya”; then Mr Trichet also hinted that the ECB could extend its purchase […]
Read more...Apologies for thin links, need to be up absurdly early for me. Richard Smith will be weighing in later with his usual sparkling eurozone commentary. Credit Cards Make You Fat Katie Porter. Correlation is not causation, but interesting nevertheless. British police know Assange’s location, await arrest orders: report Raw Story The War on Wikileaks and […]
Read more...Well, I suppose one can defend the lies testimony offered by American Securitization Forum executive director Tom Deutsch before the Senate Banking Committee yesterday if one subscribes to the Through the Looking Glass theory of usage: ` When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I […]
Read more...→ Washington’s Blog Under orders from Congress pursuant to the Dodd-Frank financial legislation, the Fed has finally released details of its emergency lending starting in 2007. As Bloomberg notes: Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. were among the top borrowers from the Term Auction Facility [TAF]… Bank of America had three loans […]
Read more...By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor for Rep. Alan Grayson. His Twitter feed is @matthewstoller We probably know more about tribes in the Amazon jungle than we do about the real nature of power in the United States. Neither political science, nor history, nor economics do very well on this. Tom Ferguson, Professor […]
Read more...These kids eat nothing but fast food: SIX hungry cheetah cubs learn to hunt with mum Daily Mail (hat tip reader May S). The photos are adorable. Goldman challenged on trading code Financial Times. This could get very interesting. Brussels launches formal Google probe Financial Times. Shades of Microsoft. Senate passes sweeping food safety bill […]
Read more...By Douglas K. Smith, Executive Director of The Punch Sulberger Program at Columbia School of Journalism Words matter. Or, more to the point, the meaning of words matter. Take ‘unemployment’. Notwithstanding years of persistently pointing out that which is the Bureau of Labor Statistics U3 series, severely understates real unemployment, nearly all accounts, whether in […]
Read more...We’ve been critics of bank “stress tests” from the get-go, because they were a shameless misuse of regulatory credibility as a tool to prop up bank stock and bond prices. It was in some was the inevitable result of how badly financial authorities (save some lonely but prominent figures in the UK, like Mervyn King […]
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