Wolf Richter: This Chart Is The Fate of Housing In America As Student Loans Bankrupt A Whole Generation
Student loans are a millstone that is crushing college educated young adults, and with them, key parts of the economy.
Read more...Category Archives: Credit markets
Wolf Richter: Hidden Leverage Threatens To Blow Up the Markets
Leverage-on-leverage vehicles were the big driver of the global financial crisis. Some investors are going back to their overly-risky ways.
Read more...GSE Reform Dead for Now
I’m a little surprised at the overly coded reporting at the New York Times and particularly the Wall Street Journal, where Nick Timiraos provides top-notch coverage on the mortgage beat, on the implications of the failure of a widely-touted, Administration-backed GSE reform bill to get out of the Senate Banking Committee. Basically, it confirms what I’ve long believed but refrained from writing about, namely, that government sponsored enterprise, aka, GSE reform, was not going to get done in this session of Congress.
Read more...Wolf Richter: LEAKED – Draghi’s Sudden Switcheroo On QE
While you weren’t paying attention, ECB chief Mario Draghi walked back his “QE is imminent” talk.
Read more...MMT Does Do Policy
Randy Wray clears up some of the “bizarre” claims that have been made about Modern Monetary Theory
Read more...Wolf Richter: Biggest Credit Bubble in History Flashes Warning – ‘Seek Cover’
Wolf Richter and Gillian Tett worry about evidence of credit mania in the US.
Read more...SEC Lawyer on Goldman CDO Case Describes How the Agency Wimped Out
Susan Beck at American Lawyer (hat tip Abigail Field) has managed to get an inside view of what was going on at the SEC when it launched its case against Goldman and a Goldman vice president, Fabrice Tourre, over a Goldman CDO called Abacus that went spectacularly bad. So was the SEC corrupt or merely incompetent?
Read more...David Dayen: How Chase Bank Denying Services to a Condom Shop Is Really About Deregulating Payday Lending
Under the odd conventions of journalism, if someone else writes about a topic, especially if it resembles a “scoop,” nobody else can write about it. So if you go down the road for a week or so chasing a story and then you see it in your friendly neighborhood copy of The Huffington Post, you can basically stop chasing. Thanks for taking food out of my mouth, HuffPo!
But in this case, the complicated story in question warrants more attention, because it’s a really good lesson in how “lobbying” incorporates more than just paying rich people in suits to sweet-talk politicians and regulators. This is the darker side of lobbying, with the venerated “small business owners” everyone loves to deify caught in the crossfire.
Read more...The SEC Finally Takes an Interest in Collateralized Loan Obligations
The old saying is “better late than never,” but as we hope to demonstrate, the SEC is awfully late to take an interest in collateralized loan obligations. The problems it has gotten curious about now were discernible years ago. And the failure to take interest until now means that misbehavior that was discussed in the press during the crisis is almost certain to go unpunished, since the statute of limitations for securities law violations has passed.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Bank of England Endorses Post-Keynesian Endogenous Money Theory
Yves here. Not only is the Bank of England siding with Post-Keynesian ideas about money, but it has even taken to creating layperson-friendly videos about the nature of money.
Read more...Is UCC Article 9 Going to Kill the Use of Bitcoin by US Businesses?
Warning to Bitcoin enthusiasts: if you airily try dismissing UCC Article 9 as a nothigburger, you’ve just established you are unqualified to comment on commercial transactions in the US. Read what follows and be warned.
Read more...Bill Black at TED Explains How Insiders Rob Banks and Cause Crises
A presentation by Bill Black disproves that TED only features elite-flattering conventional wisdom.
Read more...New In-Depth Study Shows How Debt Collectors Abuse Legal System and Borrowers
The Loyola Consumer Law Review has just released an important paper by Peter Holland of the University of Maryland Francis School of Law. It’s a large scale statistical study, the first of its kind. Its conclusions are not pretty.
Read more...Matt Stoller: Big Oil Hooked Americans on Credit Cards
The credit card industry gets short shrift when it comes to history.
Read more...Chinese Bond Default Rattles Markets; Harbinger of More Credit Woes?
A corporate bond default should hardly be a headline dominating-event unless the default in question is of a particularly large concern, or is tightly coupled (as in could, Lehman-style, trigger more distress) or is a precursor of things to come.
Read more...