February 2009

California's problems are well-known. They have been in the making for sometime. When I predicted a U.S. state would go bust this year, California was very much on my mind. But, frankly, Kansas was nowhere on my radar screen. Now…

Danielle, a European reader, recently asked what is going on in the European Union regarding mark-to-market. Basically, the EU has already relaxed mark-to-market requirements as an outgrowth of the market turbulence surrounding Lehman…

Overnight, the Japanese government released figures for Q4 2008 GDP that pointed to a depression-like fall in the Japanese economy. GDP contracted 3.3% from Q3, or 12.7% using the U.S. convention of annualizing those numbers. This is the…

The man who recently uttered the D-word about the global economy tells all to Charlie Rose.  The video is from this past Friday.

On February 6th, I started a poll asking whether the global economy was experiencing a recession or a depression. In the interim, I have tried to stay neutral on the issue. Now it is time to close out the poll. Below you can add your…

Below is my translation from an excerpt in the Swiss newspaper NZZ: In 2008, the lucrative business with loans to U.S. students came to an abrupt end. Today, UBS sits on paper that could still be worth $8.4 billion - or less. The collapse…

After Iceland collapsed and went into Depression, there were a number of reports in the press regarding countries with outsized financial sectors. The worry was that the collapse of Iceland was not an isolated incident, but rather a…

Burris Says Was Asked to Raise Funds for Blagojevich - Bloomberg.com Just how big are the UK banks - UK Bubble (Alice Cook is all over this one -- and it's not just about RBS. Thanks for the link, Alice.) Royal Bank of Scotland paid…

A recent note from Time Magazine's blog, Swampland: This looks real bad, both for Roland Burris and his country. First a quick recap: Burris gets appointed to the Senate by Rod Blagojevich, a self-made cartoon of political ineptness and…

C-Span ranks the former Presidents: Honest Abe gets top billing, follwed by Washington, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt and Truman. How did the George Bushes, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan do? Click the link to find out.