August 2008

Hello readers!I have some admin news to update you on. A few months ago, I migrated my site over to a new URL and I have not updated my RSS feed to reflect the new address. I know that many of you look at my blog via RSS Feeds or e-mail.…

I wish it were not so, but it is increasingly obvious that every part of the financial sector in the United States is infected by this menacing plague of credit losses and writedowns. Now it comes to light that the five biggest U.S. credit…

Let's hope the UBS earnings report is not as bad as Merrill. If you recall, Citi, Merrills and UBS are the three worst offenders when it comes to writedowns. Given the recent asset sales by RBS and Merrill, one would expect to see some…

A credit writedown is a reduction in the value of an asset as it is carried on a company's balance sheet. As these losses must also be reflected on the income statement, credit writedowns result in massive losses.

This commentary in the Financial Times from Byron Wien, the former Morgan Stanley guru, is spot on. Everyone making a decision to vote for President in the U.S. should heed Wien's word before pulling that lever.America’s decline will not…

On Friday, Bloomberg quoted a former LTCM partner as saying the $1.9 trillion hedge fund industry faces "much worse'' conditions than in 1998, when Long-Term Capital Management LP collapsed. "It's definitely a trickier…

I'm getting a lot of mail about the Rosenberg post and my mea culpa on inflation. To be blunt, a lot of you think I'm out to lunch and Rosenberg is too -- after all inflation is over 5% and that's just the bogus CPI measure our governments…

After RBS's writedowns on Friday, Bloomberg estimated that we have had nearly $500 billion in writedowns in the so-called 'sub-prime' crisis to date.Barclays, Britain's third-biggest bank, had first-half writedowns of 2.8 billion pounds, it…

For much of the past year I have been a critic of the Fed for keeping rates in easy money territory. One major reason was that they were going to let the inflation genie out of the bottle and that was going to be a problem. Now, I feel…

Another blurb on David Rosenberg of Merrill Lynch, this time from the Globe & Mail in Canada where Rosenberg is from. This one is more about Merrill and its culture than Rosenberg. The paper points out the irony of Rosenberg being the…