This is a guest post by Edward Harrison. There has been quite a lot of to-do about President Obama’s fat cat remarks and his meeting with bankers exhorting them to lend (which some attended via conference call only, ouch). Let me tie these events in with a few other themes into a comprehensive picture of […]
Read more...This article originally appeared at Credit Writedowns. Note: Since this post was published, three more banks in Georgia have failed. Read details here. Recently, I have been writing a lot about regional banks and the capital problems they have been having. This is having a direct impact on lending capacity available to small and medium […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. A reader at Naked Capitalism asked us to respond to a recent article from the Christian Science Monitor asking Does US need a second stimulus to create jobs? Marshall Auerback has already done some heavy lifting – and taken all of the heat in the comments. He says emphatically […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns The US Department of Agriculture highlights how the United States in the last decade, despite increased aggregate wealth, slid back significantly in terms of food insecurity as measure of poverty. With everyone now focused on the unemployment situation, it bears noting that even before the downturn in the economy […]
Read more...By George Washington of Washington’s Blog . Daniel Gross points out that part of the reason that the American stock markets are going up even though unemployment is rising and the real economy suffering is because multinational corporations headquartered in the U.S. are experiencing strong sales abroad: Here’s a puzzle: The stock markets are doing […]
Read more...It should come as no surprise that those at the top of the food chain get preferential treatment on all levels. But this still stinks to high heaven. Employees of the Goldman, the Fed, Citigroup, and other banks are getting H1N1 vaccine allotments out of proportion to what can be justified from a public health […]
Read more...The efforts to try to burnish the image of bankers have gone from being unconvincing to ridiculous. I am certain we will see Jon Stewart comment on the latest twist, of trying to claim that God wants banks (and therefore bankers) to make a lot of money. Since Calvinism is the de facto religion of […]
Read more...It was curious to see the immediate complacent stock market reaction to the FOMC remarks that the Fed is going to keep rates low for an extended period (although it did crumble right before the close of trading). Yes, the central bank will have a tricky balancing act when it has to mop up liquidity, […]
Read more...One week ago, I put up a post on the plight of a family that was at the end of its rope financially due to a lack of savings prior to the firing of the main income provider at the start of 2009. They had started using credit cards to pay for necessities, had paid […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward harrison of Credit Writedowns Yves covered this in an earlier post overnight. Here’s my take. This is probably my fourth post on the tangled web woven by securitization, which puts a considerable distance between home owners and mortgagees which own a mortgage. The issue is causing huge problems in bankruptcy and foreclosure […]
Read more...Some readers like to demonize those who get in over there heads with debt as people who lived high on the hog and had their day of reckoning come upon them. This story, forwarded from a reader, shows the picture is more complicated. When I was young, savings of six months of living expenses was […]
Read more...By John Bougearel, Director of Futures and Equity Research at Structural Logic. The core of America is the middle class. And Harvard Law Professor and chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel COP ( the COP is to oversee TARP, the Troubled Assets Relief Program) Elizabeth Warren tells us that the core of America is being […]
Read more...I’m of two minds about taking up this theme, since stating what ought to be obvious but is nevertheless unpleasant and inconvenient is apt to get one branded as lunatic fringe. Access journalism has created what is in many respects a controlled press. And that matters because people are far more suggestible than most of […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. In the 1987 movie classic Wall Street, the sinister protagonist Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas gives this famous quote: In the last seven deals that I’ve been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you. I […]
Read more...Quelle horreur, some smart people are starting to question whether banking serves a redeeming social function. Of course, in the abstract, it does. Banking (or more accurately, extending credit) is essential for commerce. But any essential support function, if it overpriced in relationship to its true value, becomes a drag on the productive economy. And […]
Read more...