Yves Smith Watch: These two posts are MUST reads for anyone concerned about derivatives, systemic risk and regulation. And Yves is mentioned in both! Brooksley Born Raises an Important Question, But Answers are Weak FireDogLake (hat tip Beverly) The Magnetar Trade: How One Hedge Fund Helped Keep the Bubble Going ProPublica (hat tip John) Debt […]
Read more...I originally wrote this post at Credit Writedowns under a different title yesterday. I have changed the title to more accurately reflect what I am driving at in the post. Otherwise the post is exactly the same. The question is: which media companies will find their revenue streams threatened by the shift in the financial […]
Read more...The Roosevelt Institute sponsored a conference at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, “Facing the Fracture: Media & Economic Understanding,” which focused on the reporting challenge posed by the global financial crisis, particularly given the continuing economic pressures on news organizations. I’ve seen the difficulties faced by the MSM in conventional terms, and […]
Read more...This is a bit O/T for the blog, but Matt Taibbi is in full flamethrowing rant mode, always an impressive sight (will “you’ve been vampire squidded” eventually enter the lexicon?) And the target is plenty deserving. Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, has attempted to defend the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now current Pope, […]
Read more...The so-called Valukas report on the Lehman bankruptcy has put a harsh light on the final months of the floundering firm and the regulators who stepped up their oversight, in particular, the New York Fed. Some of the NY Fed’s moves have been so indefensible as to in and of themselves warrant full bore investigation. […]
Read more...I’ve seldom seen so much rubbish written by people who ought to know better in a single day. Many critical thinkers have heaped the scorn and incredulity on three articles, one a piece on Rahm Emanuel slotted to run in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, another an artfully packed laudatory piece on Timothy Geithner […]
Read more...By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive I’m usually cynical about these “genius of Wall Street” articles, but the Vanity Fair article “Larry Fink’s $12 Trillion Shadow” by Suzanna Andrews, about the head of the world’s largest money manager, BlackRock, raises the cliche to another level. My skepticism results both from the disconnect […]
Read more...By Richard Smith, a London-based capital markets IT specialist Hmm, I wonder if Yves’s resolution authority post will become the econoblogosphere’s equivalent to Clochemerle’s shattered urinal and its entourage of rioters. Surely not; yet it’s impressive how often such modest, utilitarian objects – a pissoir, a blog post about a financial reform proposal – can […]
Read more...The Fed, having performed abysmally in recognizing the growth of a global debt bubble, and then having botched the early-stage reactions (after each of the first three acute phases, it went into Mission Accomplished mode), now is pushing not simply to hold its turf, but expand its sphere of influence. From the New York Times: […]
Read more...It’s hard for those of us who are not political junkies or DC residents to relate to most official power struggles, but the one involving Rahm Emanuel has been building over the last few weeks to the point that it is getting hard not to notice (aside: for unrelated reasons Rahm has become a Person […]
Read more...I’m having a Dean Baker moment. Baker’s blog Beat the Press engages in short-form shreddings of the economic reporting of the day, with the New York Times and the Washington Post his favorite targets (for instance, Baker at least once a week criticizes the MSM for relying on forecasts from economists who failed to see […]
Read more...Sorry for two AIG stories in succession; I just posted the other one when I saw the Bloomberg story just released, “Secret AIG Document Shows Goldman Sachs Minted Most Toxic CDOs.” I’m a bit puzzled as to what the fracas is about here. The formerly redacted Schedule A, the list of the CDOs that the […]
Read more...A very good article in The Nation by Sebastian Jones, “The Media-Lobbying Complex,” (hat tip Tom F) has gone peculiarly unnoticed in the blogosphere, which is a real shame. It does some good, old-fashioned reporting to identify 75 individuals who were regularly presented on TV as experts, and by implication independent, when in fact they […]
Read more...Team Obama’s answer to all negative feedback from the real world is to treat it as a communication/PR problem. Repackage the product, put the “new, improved” message out on all available frequencies, and move on to the next “public is a chump” maneuver. As we noted yesterday, the brand mavens have been assigned to Timothy […]
Read more...The evidence just keeps mounting that Team Obama sees its flagging poll ratings and increasing criticism of key incumbents as a mere communications/imaging problem. Its response is just to slap more lipstick on those pigs. Let’s look at a couple of particularly obvious plants. One is from the Washington Post by Dana Milbank, “Why Obama […]
Read more...