When I worked for Goldman, and later McKinsey, professionals at each firm would joke about presentations that passed the weight test. That tag line referred to documents heavy enough to land on a client desk with an impressive “thunk” so as to seem intimidating even before opening them. The implication was that length could and […]
Read more...There is a perfectly fine article up at the Wall Street Journal on the current, probably weakening, state of the housing market, save that it fails to discuss the elephant in the room, that of the continuing moribund conditions in the so-called private label securitization market.
Read more...By Bill Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a former senior financial regulator
This column analyses Obama’s claim that he got the better of the Republicans in the negotiations.
The administration (implicitly) argues that its claim of extraordinary negotiating success represents a miraculous accomplishment given the facts that the Republicans were holding all legislation hostage to their non-negotiable demand that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans be extended and the administration’s irrevocable decision that it could not call the Republican’s bluff because the economy would likely sink back into recession unless tax cuts for the middle class were immediately passed…..
The third problem is that no element of the claimed miracle is true….
Read more...We’ve harrumphed more than occasionally on the dubious quality of Chinese official releases (see discussions on GDP, inflation, and other drive-by-data-shootings for a selection of past grumblings).
So we are delighted to see that Wikileaks is on this beat too. From a March 2007 cable on a discussion between Clark T. Randt and “Fifth Generation Star Li Kequiang”:
Read more...Readers may recall that this site broke the story of litigation against Lender Processing Services, the biggest player in foreclosure management on behalf of mortgage servicers. These cases, launched earlier in the fall, accused the company of taking impermissible legal fees. These class action lawsuits were joined by the US bankruptcy trustee for the Northern District of Mississippi, both for herself and on behalf of all US bankruptcy fees, which meant she felt the issues set forth in the case had merit and were serious. In November, an additional class action case was filed against LPS, this time securities litigation, charging the company with making false and misleading statements to investors from July 29, 2009 to October 4, 2010, including “deceptive and improper document execution and preparation related to foreclosure proceedings.”
Subsequently, as our Richard Smith detailed earlier today, Housing Wire’s Paul Jackson attacked critics of LPS, including this blogger, of going off half baked in accusing the company of engaging in document fabrication. A Reuters investigation published today supports the critics’s case, revealing that document creation was far more extensive that the company has suggested.
Read more...Events during this financial crisis have repeatedly displayed a degree of disrespect for various pundits’ authority; every so often another pulpit is toppled. So spare a thought for the pundits, the most unmourned of crisis casualties. One skips through the roll of slight miscues (“Lehman repo looks solid”, April ’08), shame (“believe Fuld, Lehman bears […]
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...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...No formal announcement yet, but some presumably well-sourced rumours about the size of the Irish bailout (EUR 85Bn), and the rate (7%, via the redoubtable Twitterer on all matters Irish @LorcanRK). While we await the budget statement, there are reasons to suspect, or hope, that the bailout, like Godot, will never come, because it’s failing […]
Read more...Some geographical and economic clarifications from politicians, officials and commentators: 1. Spain is not Greece – Elena Salgado, Spanish Finance Minister, ~February, 2010. 2. Portugal is not Greece – The Economist, 22nd April, 2010. 3. Greece is not Ireland – George Papaconstantinou, Greek Finance Minister, 8th November 2010. 4. Spain is neither Ireland nor Portugal […]
Read more...One of the annoying and persistent Big Lies of the financial crisis is that the rescues were a really good thing because they saved the world as we know it. That argument is dubious for a host of reasons: the world as we know it is the very same one that went off a cliff, […]
Read more...On the eve of Senate Banking Committee hearings into mortgage securitizations and the release of a Congressional Oversight Panel report covering the same terrain, the mortgage securitization industry has a full bore pushback underway. A story in the New York Times bears all the hallmarks of being a PR plant. Remember the sympathetic New York […]
Read more...As an article in today’s New York Times makes clear, Robert Shiller has joined a group of behavioral economists that is advocating the use of propaganda and the sublter forms of manipulation of the public that Walter Lippmann famously called “the manufacture of consent.” In one sense, this ugly development is coming full circle. Lippmann […]
Read more...Various commenters have noticed that Mish’s blog has vanished. My guess – a spurious “terms of service violation”. Google’s robot spam monitors sometimes screw up by giving false positives – something like this happened to Yves (see para 3) back when NC was on Blogger. I can’t imagine they’ll shut up Mish for long and […]
Read more...Dunno if you guys in the US are up to speed on the Twitter joke trial, a classic collision of new technology, post 9/11 paranoia, witless judges, and a hapless victim. Here’s one of our leading comedy scriptwriters on the warpath back in May. The conviction was upheld on appeal! Here’s a geek carefully setting […]
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