November 2008

The latest news in bailouts involves GE Capital. Apparently, the company has gone begging to the FDIC for a bailout. In fact, the FDIC has offered to back $139 billion in GE Capital debt. I have serious reservations about this move by…

The big news this week is that writedowns have moved near trillion dollar territory. As all of the banks report earnings and come clean about losses, the figures are staggering. The largest writedowns came from the GSEs with Fannie Mae…

Deregulation and laissez-faire orthodoxy bears much of the blame for the current economic mess we are experiencing. Dean Baker notes with chagrin that Barack Obama, who will take office as U.S. President shortly, has put some of the…

Jon Danielsson has a very thorough piece up on the VoxEU site which details the catastrophic collapse of Iceland and its banking system. This is a cautionary tale on two fronts. First, Iceland was a small country with a very large…

Many will suffer at the hands of Lehman Brothers. That is the verdict by white-shoe law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz - a firm I had the pleasure of working with during my previous life in finance. They are very good.…

Robert Hall, the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which is the official arbiter of recession in the United States, has said the evidence is now "conclusive" that the U.S. is in recession. For me, that's pretty much…

The stars are aligned for the big three automakers because everyone is coming out in their favor. First, we heard that they were meeting with congressional leaders on Capitol Hill. Then, we heard that Rahm Emanuel, a house democrat and…

Last week, I posted an article on why the recent rally did not look anything like a bull market titled "An amazing market rally. What's next?"o, it seems like I was bullish for all of two weeks. Yet, the truth is I was never bullish on the…

The financial sector bailout continues on track. Meanwhile, financial services sector losses have hit $919 billion. This summer, I had been of the view that we would see $1.5 trillion in losses before this was over. However, this is…

Last night an article by Niels Jensen of Absolute Return Partners caught my eye. In it, he made a very strong case for worrying about European bank exposure to emerging markets and its potential for creating systemic risk. I would like to…