July 2009

This is part two of the End of Wall Street series the Wall Street Journal is producing. Chapter Two of A WSJ series: What was going through the minds of CEOs, corporate boards, fund managers and mortgage lenders as they created…

Charlie spoke with Obama’s Director of the Office of Management & Budget yesterday.  The video is below and it runs 30 minutes.  Orszag talks about Obama’s health care reform proposal after the first 11 minutes taken up by…

Not necessarily. There’s a lot more to it than just GDP.  Last year at almost exactly this time, I mentioned this in my post Recession while GDP is growing? because a lot of people were getting excited about the fact that Q2 GDP was…

This is a huge deal.  FASB is considering requiring all financial assets be valued at fair values on balance sheets.  Hat tip Andrew. Bloomberg reports (notice my highlighting in bold): The scope of the FASB’s initiative,…

When last week’s US jobless claims number was released, I indicated it was artificially low because of changes in the summer auto production schedules.  Rather than look at the numbers as they are released from week to week, we should look…

Bernanke Says Add Consumer Protection to Fed Mandate - Bloomberg.com You have to respect the chutzpah behind this. Audacious NAB raises $2b in oversubscribed placement Banks are getting capital everywhere. Buffett's $91,000 shares…

Here’s a credit-crisis video retrospective from the Wall Street Journal. It is chapter one of a three part series.  Notice the Wall Street meme that subprime borrowers caused the crisis which is patently false.  It’s all about…

Germany never participated in the upswing of the housing bubble. This fact has led German politicians of all stripes to mistakenly believe their banking system was somehow immune to the problems infecting bubble markets like the US or…

  Here’s a nice clip from Stephen Roach from last week asking “where’s the demand?”  His thesis is pretty simple:  we have an inventory-induced upturn that might actually show positive GDP growth in the U.S. for Q3, what I…

President Barack Obama was elected last year in a sizable victory over his Republican competitor. Bolstering his position was the huge Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. Given these advantages, combined with intelligence and…