August 2008

The Wall Street Journal has a good piece from Yuka Hayashi about lessons that can be learned from Japan's experiences with its bank crisis in the 1990s. While I do take issue with a number of the article's assertions, on the whole it sheds…

Despite my protestations that inflation is due to fall sharply over the next six months, I do have to point out that real interest rates are not only negative in the U.S. all the way across the curve, they are also negative in most of the…

(See my Credit Crisis Timeline for the news stories associated with the writedowns and related events during the crisis, the most recent of which you can find here.)Yalman Onaran at Bloomberg News has tallied the writedowns in the credit…

I wrote a blurb on the Georgia-Russia struggle on my blog. But I wanted to add a blurb here from Mikhail Gorbachev's Op-Ed in today's Washington Post. His viewpoint stands in great contrast to the punderati of Washington. Framed in a real…

If Georgia or Ukraine were a part of NATO, we would be willing to go to war for them as that is what NATO means. Think about it: Russia attacks the Ukraine or Georgia and the U.S. and its allies go to war to stop the Russian aggression.…

According to Seattle-based Zilliow, nearly one-third of U.S. home buyers who bought in the last five years are now underwater. A full 45% of those who bought at the peak in 2006 have negative equity in their homes. Negative equity makes…

While the finance world is concerned with its own problems of writedowns and deflating asset prices, a proxy war of great importance is being fought in the country of Georgia. It has everything to do with both a Russo-American power…

The Financial Times Deutschland is reporting that China and Iraq want to revive a Saddam-era oil contract between the two nation that is worth billions of dollars. The contract, an obvious economic coup for China, secures Beijing…

My Commentary: The lead story today is about UBS and it.s $5.1 billion in writedowns and what this means for the financial system going forward. When one combines the downbeat assessment by UBS management regarding Q3 and Q4 with the…

UBS reported a loss of 358 million Swiss Francs ($332 million) after writing down a further $5.1 billion in debt.In my post yesterday, I said the market expected as much. But, more importantly UBS has confirmed plans also mentioned in…