Category Archives: Credit markets

Nobel Prize Winner Robert Merton Slams Fed for “Negative Wealth Effect” Policies

Nobel Prize winner Robert Merton and Arlin Muralidhar have charged ZIRP and QE happy central banks with economic malpractice.

Elizabeth Warren Throws Down Gauntlet, Calls for Genuine Financial Reform

Elizabeth Warren makes a bold call for wide-ranging, serious financial reform.

Greece: Default or Grexit?

A Greek default does not mean an inevitable Grexit. But even in the event of a default in the Eurozone, the costs to Greece of staying in the Eurozone are set to rise.

Bill Black: How the “Super Crunchers” Became the “Super Torturers” of Finance Data

Many of the concerns about Big Data focus on the surveillance apparatus used to collect it, or on the naive modeling approaches, like attributing causality to mere correlations. Here Black addresses an established problem: that of deliberate abuse of models.

Debunking the Causes of the Eurozone Crisis

The orthodox German view of the Eurozone crisis gets shellacked at an important INET panel.

CFPB Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Proposal May Enable Redlining

CFPB’s HDMA proposal includes no reporting requirements to determine whether mortgage servicers are treating distressed borrowers equally.

Rob Parenteau: Draghi’s Doom Loop(s) – More Than Just the Euthanasia of the Rentiers

Draghi’s Doom Loop(s): why the ECB’s QE, combined with negative deposit rates, could set a 1987 style crash for bonds in motion.

Greece Threatens to Miss IMF Payment, Issue Drachma (Updated)

Greece has decided to up the ante in its negotiations with the Troika. The open question is whether the latest move, the press leak via Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph that Greece will miss its April 9 payment to the IMF so that it can continue to make pension payments, and has started to make plans to issue the drachma, are game-changers that Greece hopes they will be.

Greece Throws Away One of Its Eurogroup Memo Wins, Submits Reforms Reaching Up to a 3.9% Fiscal Surplus

One of the things we’ve stressed is that the Greek government’s repeated claims that it is submitting an anti-austerity reform package is untrue. The Greek government committed to achieving a fiscal surplus of 1.0 to 1.5% and has separately said it will always run a fiscal surplus. We have stressed that running a fiscal surplus is an economic dampener, and is even more damaging in a severely depressed economy like Greece.

So what has Greece done? It has submitted a reform package that it says will meet an even higher fiscal surplus target.

Greece Submits Insufficiently Detailed Reform List; Tsipras Tells Parliament of “Peace with Honor,” Um, “Honorable Compromise”

The Greek government continues to climb down substantively on its promises of resistance to the dictates of its creditors as time pressure intensifies.

Tom Adams: The Ocwen Meltdown: When a Company Discloses Conflicts of Interest, You Should Believe Them

By Tom Adams, securitization professional for over 20 years and partner at Paykin, Krieg & Adams, LLP. You can follow him on Twitter at @advisoryA It’s been a while since I wrote here about Ocwen Financial Corporation http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/02/tom-adams-ocwens-servicing-meltdown-proves-failure-of-obamas-mortgage-settlements.html , the large non-bank mortgage servicer, but things haven’t gotten any better for the company or its […]

Central Banks Warn: Investors May Get Crushed When They All Run for the Exits

This post illustrates how remarkably short investors’ memories are. Or they may be betting that if they have a big enough hissy fit when monetary authorities raise rates, as they did during the taper tantrum of 2013, that central banks will lose their nerve.

Ilargi: Kiev, Moscow, Bonds and Haircuts

Why the proposed Ukraine bond restructuring is a geopolitical matter, part of the US push against Russia via Kiev, and not mere high finance.

Bill Black: How FCIC Spurned Its One Chance at Greatness

How the FCIC not merely ignored but actually suppressed information that revealed what and more important, who, drove the crisis.