My last pop at New Zealand’s regulatory set-up mentioned New Image International, the company that uses multi-level marketing techniques to sell Colostrum as a miracle cure. The New Image product pitch is a generic hoax, as explained last time out:
…major warning signs include:
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New Zealand is playing host to the sort of large scale miracle cure scam that would get investigated for wire fraud in the US. One company even has a New Zealand stock exchange listing!
Read more...Yves here. Readers may note that Wray cites the cost of the US bailout of the financial crisis as $29 trillion. I’ve never seen a figure like that (the highest estimate I’ve seen was from SIGTARP, which set the “theoretical maximum” at $23 trillion, and that figure was widely criticized. Barry Ritholtz has kept tab over time, and his tally has been in the $10-$11 trillion range). But this estimate is not core to his argument.
By L. Randall Wray, a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Cross posted from EconoMonitor
Greece’s Finance Minister reportedly said that his nation cannot continue to service its debt and hinted that a fifty percent write-down is likely. Greece’s sovereign debt is 350 billion euros—so losses to holders would be 175 billion euros. That would just be the beginning, however.
Read more...By Richard Smith
The little story NC carried a couple of months ago about New Zealand scam companies has come out from behind the paywall, courtesy of the NZ Herald (hat tip: John G.). We hinted at the time that the problem’s large and nasty, and the NZ Government admits this in a cabinet paper:
Read more...Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Overnight, a group of us were exchanging e-mails on the recent coordinated central bank action to provide European banks the funding being denied them by the markets. I haven’t been active on the e-mail chain, but I did find some of the commentary interesting. I had a few comments of note […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback and Edward Harrison Marshall here. That was an impressive rally into the close in New York. Stocks ended up across the board. Yves Smith, who was off the grid today, asked “was there any news driving” the rally into the close or was it just tape painting. Here’s what I wrote: No, […]
Read more...By Richard Smith You won’t be hearing much from Yves today: Traceroute has started… traceroute to vroo.pair.com (209.68.1.136), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets 1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 5.882 ms 0.760 ms 0.631 ms 2 yves.tearing.hair.out (yves.tearing.hair.out) 8.501 ms 15.333 ms 9.936 ms 3 te-9-4-ur01.brunswick.me.boston.comcast.net (68.87.36.53) 9.966 ms 10.767 ms 9.605 ms 4 te-0-7-0-2-sur01.brunswick.me.boston.comcast.net (68.85.162.61) 10.250 ms […]
Read more...Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Paul Krugman has another piece up on MMT. I like this piece a lot more than the last one he wrote. I suggest you read it. Here’s the one passage I do find troubling, however: Let’s have a more or less concrete example. Suppose that at some future date — a […]
Read more...This is a post I wrote last summer clarifying some points that I have learned about Modern Monetary Theory. The genesis of the post was a gross mischaracterization of Modern Money Theory (MMT) by Paul Krugman in a piece called “I Would Do Anything For Stimulus, But I Won’t Do That (Wonkish)”, which Paul Krugman […]
Read more...More old and new delights from the little shop of horrors that is the New Zealand Company Registry
Read more...Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Looking up the term procyclical on the Internet, I see the Wikipedia entry defines it as: Procyclical is a term used in economics to describe how an economic quantity is related to economic fluctuations. It is the opposite of countercyclical… In business cycle theory and finance, any economic quantity that is […]
Read more...…which is not good news for honest New Zealand investors trying to do a due diligence exercise; nor for the New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development’s reputation, if it has one…
Read more...This is another summer rerun piece. I wrote the following post “If the U.S. stopped issuing treasuries, would it go broke?” in November 2009. At the time, I was getting to grip with how the government designed constraints in order to prevent deficit spending. What was and still is clear to me is that while […]
Read more...We are in the process of seeking recommendations for our inaugural FEMA Awards for Exceptional Financial Crisis Management. We must thank our reader Swedish Lex for providing the inspiration for establishing these prizes.
We are looking for nominees in each category. We have provided some illustrative candidates for specific prizes. Readers are also encouraged to suggest additional categories if they feel we have overlooked noteworthy types of crisis behavior that are worthy of recognition.
Our initial categories:
Read more...The lyrics are clever and it’s peppier than most parody/humor songs. Enjoy!
From the Guardian, hat tip reader Carol B:
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